Nikita Popov
Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat
Berlin, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikita Popov is a senior software engineer in Berlin with 15 years of experience building and optimizing language runtimes, compilers, and backend infrastructure. Currently at Red Hat, he works on upstream LLVM middle-end optimizations and integrates LLVM into the Rust toolchain, while previously leading PHP core development and CI at JetBrains. A prolific open-source contributor, his work spans high-impact projects like LLVM, Rust, OSS-Fuzz and the PHP internals book, with notable contributions to fuzzing, AST extensions, and performance-sensitive libraries such as Twig and FastRoute. He combines deep systems-level expertise with practical engineering—implementing typed arrays, rewindable iterators, and serialization mechanics—plus a physics and computer science background from TU Berlin that informs his analytical approach.
14 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics, 1.1, Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics, 1.1 at Technische Universität Berlin
Stackoverflow
101,282reputation
6.8mreached
599answers
25questions
namespaces
top-5%
associative-array
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foreach
top-1%
if-statement
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regex
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trim
top-5%
Github Skills (101)
parser10
website-development10
lexer10
abstract-syntax-tree10
testing10
bash10
loops10
phpmyadmin10
if-statement10
automation10
code-generation10
routes10
fuzzer10
routing-slip10
object-oriented-programming10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
phpinternalsbook/PHP-Internals-Book
Nov 2012 - Aug 2022
PHP Internals Book
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 131 commits, 67 PRs in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Nikita contributed to the PHP Internals Book, focusing on the object-oriented programming (OOP) chapter. Their commits included writing about simple classes and object storage concepts, including the creation, destruction, and handling of objects. They also added content on implementing typed arrays, iterators, and serialization mechanisms. The user also wrote about object handlers and implementing magic interfaces.
internalsphpphp-internals
nikic/iter
Jul 2013 - Sep 2020
Iteration primitives using generators
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 4 reviews, 56 commits in 7 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nikita primarily contributed to the `iter` library by adding functionality for rewindable iterators. Their commits focused on introducing new functions such as `makeRewindable`, `callRewindable`, and `chunkWithKeys`, which enhance the library's flexibility. The user also added tests for the new rewindable functions and optimized existing functions.
iteratorgeneratorsarraysprimitivesiteration
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