Richard Low
Software Engineer at Apple
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Low is a seasoned software engineer with 19 years' experience specializing in distributed systems, performance engineering and making data accessible and useful. Based in the UK and currently at Apple since 2013, he blends hands‑on optimisation work—such as notable performance improvements to the widely used swift-nio networking library—with leadership roles in analytics and distributed systems across startups and enterprise engagements. His background spans research and product delivery for big‑data platforms (Apache Cassandra, Hadoop) and customer-facing technical leadership, giving him a rare mix of deep algorithmic training (PhD-level) and practical production experience. Colleagues rely on him to find elegant, high-performance fixes under real-world constraints while keeping customer needs central.
19 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Bristol UniversityMA, Physics, Computer Science, MA, Physics, Computer Science at Cambridge University
Stackoverflow
61reputation
9kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (15)
asynchronous10
event-driven10
swift10
high-performance10
non-blocking10
performance-optimization10
async10
bytebuffer10
testing10
client-websocket9
websocket-client9
websocket9
websockets-client9
storage6
cassandra6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
apple/swift-nio
Nov 2019 - Nov 2019
Event-driven network application framework for high performance protocol servers & clients, non-blocking.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:5 PRs, 17 comments, 1 issue in 24 days
Contributions summary:Richard made significant contributions to optimize the `swift-nio` library, focusing on performance improvements for critical components. They implemented a faster `withContiguousStorageIfAvailable` for `WebSocketMaskingKey`, resulting in a 2x speed increase. The user also benchmarked and optimized `ByteBuffer` setBytes operations, particularly for `CircularBuffer` types, and added performance tests to measure improvements. Furthermore, they addressed a potential crash by disallowing zero EventLoop threads.
swift5event-drivennon-blockingswift-servertcp
richardalow/xnjb
Sep 2011 - Oct 2012
Contributions:16 commits in 1 year
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