Nicolas Hillegeer
Engineer at Google
Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicolas Hillegeer is a seasoned software engineer with 16 years of experience, currently working as an SRE at Google and based in Bavaria, Germany. He specializes in high-performance, fault-tolerant distributed systems and databases, with hands-on low-level coding in C/C++ alongside Scala, Go, Java, and Python. Nicolas has a track record of practical optimizations in prominent open-source projects—contributing runtime fixes and scheduler tracing improvements to the Go repo and performance enhancements to tools like log4jscanner and Neovim. His background spans DevOps, provisioning, and embedded-friendly media distribution systems, reflecting an ability to deliver efficient solutions on low-power hardware. Holding advanced studies in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, he combines academic depth with pragmatic engineering and a habit of squeezing extra performance out of real-world systems.
16 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master, Artificial Intelligence, Master, Artificial Intelligence at Universitat Autònoma de BarcelonaLatin / Mathematics, Latin / Mathematics at Sint-lievenscollegeMaster, Engineering / Computer Science, Master, Engineering / Computer Science at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
English, Dutch, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese
Github Skills (41)
runtimes10
tracer10
scripting10
memory-management10
run-time10
cmake10
c1110
c1710
script10
go10
sys10
performance-optimization10
fileio10
build-automation10
file-handling10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
google/log4jscanner
Feb 2022 - Mar 2022
A log4j vulnerability filesystem scanner and Go package for analyzing JAR files.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer / Performance EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 6 commits, 2 PRs in 23 days
Contributions summary:Nicolas focused on optimizing the performance of the log4jscanner tool. Their contributions involved improving resource management by closing zip file readers earlier and reusing buffers to reduce allocations. Further optimizations included adding benchmarks to test the code's performance with nested JAR files and implementing a dynamic buffer pool to prevent excessive memory usage in long-running server contexts. These changes targeted reducing memory allocations and improving the efficiency of the JAR file scanning process.
golanganalyzinggo-packagesecurity-toolsscanner
neovim/neovim
Sep 2016 - Jul 2022
Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 6 commits, 8 PRs in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Nicolas focused on improving the codebase by addressing compiler warnings and introducing more efficient and robust memory management. Their contributions include fixing uninitialized member warnings, addressing warnings about directives inside macros, and resolving signed vs. unsigned comparison warnings. Furthermore, they enhanced the code by incorporating function attributes to improve compiler optimization and clarify function intent, particularly in memory allocation routines.
usabilityapiluavimvim-plugin
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