Nick Terrell
Software Engineer at Facebook
Menlo Park, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Terrell is a software engineer with 11 years of experience in high-performance C++ systems and compression algorithms, currently based in Menlo Park and working at Facebook. He is an active open-source contributor to heavyweight projects like zstd and lz4, where he has improved test coverage, fixed subtle bounds and memory-safety bugs, and added features for multithreaded and in-place decompression. His work spans build tooling and cross-platform installation fixes (xar), code generation bug fixes (fbthrift), and core data-structure robustness in folly, showing a pragmatic focus on reliability and tooling. Nick combines deep systems-level expertise with a test-driven mindset, and has a track record of addressing edge cases that improve real-world robustness in widely used compression libraries.
11 years of coding experience
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of Michigan College of Engineering
Github Skills (38)
lz410
algorithm10
debugging10
deco10
algorithms10
debug10
c-language10
python10
compress10
testing10
compression-algorithm10
memory-management10
command-line-interface10
kernel-module10
c1110
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
facebookincubator/xar
Jun 2018 - Jan 2022
executable archive format
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 18 commits, 4 PRs in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily focused on improving the build process and error handling of the `xar` executable archive format. They fixed installation issues on OS X, enhanced error messages when dependencies are missing, and implemented functionality to download dependencies using pip. They also added an `unxar` executable for extracting XAR contents and improved the build process by incorporating features like specifying arguments for the raw-executable and handling duplicate files.
pythonvfstarballarchivenodejs
facebook/zstd
Sep 2016 - Jan 2023
Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:2 releases, 632 reviews, 1199 commits in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Nick's commits focus on improving the test coverage and functionality of the zstd compression library. They implemented new libFuzzer targets to test the stream compression functionality. They fixed bugs in the compression logic by adding bounds checks, and implemented changes to support in-place and multithreaded decompression using the advanced API. Furthermore, they added a regression test for verifying dictionary compression and test assertions to improve the reliability of the codebase.
deflatezstandardbzip2compressionzstd
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