Nick Black
Principal Satellite Engineer
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Black is a Principal Satellite Engineer with 26 years of systems, compiler, and high-performance computing experience, currently building low-latency, high-throughput space systems at Microsoft from Atlanta. A longtime Debian Developer and prolific open-source contributor with accepted patches in 100+ projects (including util-linux and the GPU-powered kitty terminal), he is known for making "computers go fast" through deep expertise in Linux/FreeBSD internals, io_uring, eBPF/XDP, and GPU toolchains. His background spans compiler design and CUDA/OpenCL work at NVIDIA and ArrayFire, distributed and embedded networking (CAN/LoRa/802.11), and FPGA/embedded development, complemented by teaching and consulting roles in HPC. An award-winning engineer (Google Open Source and multiple technical infrastructure awards) with an unusual claim to being a leading authority on terminal graphics, he blends rigorous algorithmic thinking with practical low-level craft. He holds BS and MS degrees from Georgia Tech and an MS in Analytics, and enjoys soldering together the corner cases that make production systems hum.
26 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, BS, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics at Georgia Institute of Technology
English, Latin
Stackoverflow
366reputation
33kreached
13answers
1question
Github Skills (23)
linux10
terminal-emulator10
c1110
terminal-application10
c1710
emulation10
documentation10
go8
memory-management8
go-application8
golang8
go-language8
debugging7
debug7
vt1007
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
util-linux/util-linux
Jul 2012 - Nov 2020
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 PR in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nick focused on improving the `libblkid` library, which is part of the `util-linux` project. Their commits primarily addressed code quality, addressing issues with format attributes in the sprintf function, and fixing potential truncation issues. They also made improvements to code that could have alignment problems with memcpy, corrected printf format specifiers, and fixed typos in function comments.
kovidgoyal/kitty
Nov 2020 - Jul 2021
Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Technical Writer
Backend Developer & Technical WriterContributions:5 commits, 13 PRs, 50 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the `kitty` terminal emulator by fixing a bug in the sextant rendering within the font rendering code. They also made several documentation updates to the graphics protocol documentation, clarifying compression and base64 encoding, along with small textual improvements. The user's contributions focused on the terminal's internal font rendering and documentation of its graphics protocol.
pythonvt100windowsterminal-emulatorsgpu
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