Nicholas Wilson
Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Wilson is a Research Software Development Engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, performance-sensitive systems and taking ideas from concept to production. Based in Cambridge and working on Excel research at Microsoft Research Cambridge, he blends research-grade thinking with pragmatic delivery for Excel Online. Previously at RealVNC he progressed from desktop C++ work to leading web services and cloud migrations, authored new secure protocols and low-latency video streaming techniques, and ported large services from Java to Go. He is an active open-source contributor to notable projects such as mbedTLS and Emscripten, with contributions ranging from cryptographic curve support and safety refactors to system-level time and memory fixes. Comfortable spanning teams and technical domains, he pairs mathematical training from Cambridge with hands-on systems engineering to improve quality, performance and maintainability. An understated strength is his consistent focus on silencing hard-to-find bugs and analyzer warnings, reflecting a bias toward long-term code health.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BA (Hons), MA, MMath, Mathematics, BA (Hons), MA, MMath, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (27)
javascript10
c-language10
tls1210
system-programming10
c1110
rust-wasm10
tls1310
wasm-pack10
c1710
mtls10
cryptography10
libtls10
emscripten10
blazor-webassembly10
webassembly10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
Mbed-TLS/mbedtls
May 2015 - Jun 2018
An open source, portable, easy to use, readable and flexible TLS library, and reference implementation of the PSA Cryptography API. Releases are on a varying cadence, typically around 3 - 6 months between releases.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 12 PRs, 80 comments in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to the mbedtls library by addressing typos and documentation issues across multiple header and source files. They fixed minor bugs related to path count checks and const-ness in the SSL configuration. Moreover, the user implemented support for Curve448 and included order of Curve25519 base point data. The user also focused on silencing clang-analyzer warnings and refactoring the code to improve safety.
cryptography-libraryapisslcryptographycryptography-api
emscripten-core/emscripten
Sep 2014 - May 2015
Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & System Programmer
Back-end Developer & System ProgrammerContributions:11 commits, 8 PRs, 36 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the Emscripten codebase, focusing on areas like timezone handling, memory management, and system clock implementations. They addressed issues related to timezone calculations in JavaScript, corrected memory initialization problems, and implemented functionalities such as `clock_gettime` for the `CLOCK_MONOTONIC` clock. The user also made changes to build configurations and unit tests to ensure correct behavior.
emscriptenwebassemblycompilerwasmllvm
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