Sy Brand
Staff Software Engineer - WebAssembly at Fastly
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSy Brand is a Staff Software Engineer focused on WebAssembly with a decade of experience building compilers, runtimes, debuggers and profilers for heterogeneous systems. He has driven tooling and standards work—from shipping LLVM backends and OpenCL debuggers at Codeplay to editing HSA profiling specs—and later advocated for C++ at Microsoft before joining Fastly. A C++ expert and language enthusiast, he contributes to widely used projects like microsoft/vcpkg and maintains tl::expected, reflecting a blend of pragmatic package work and foundational library design. Based in Edinburgh, he runs a technical blog and pairs deep systems craftsmanship with a community-minded interest in developer tooling and standards.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Hons Computer Science, BSc Hons Computer Science at University of St Andrews
Stackoverflow
64,747reputation
3.7mreached
1,072answers
12questions
namespaces
top-5%
dictionary
top-5%
overloading
top-5%
undefined-behavior
top-5%
oop
top-5%
return-value
top-5%
Github Skills (50)
c-language10
lib10
package-management10
cmake10
html-template10
python-templates10
data-structure10
inheritance10
vector10
code-templates10
apptemplates10
ports10
data-structures10
vcpkg10
error-handling10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
TartanLlama/expected
Oct 2017 - Nov 2022
C++11/14/17 std::expected with functional-style extensions
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 13 reviews, 129 commits in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Sy's contributions primarily involve the initial implementation of a C++11/14/17 standard expected type, named `tl::expected`, along with associated functional-style extensions. The code changes show the definition of the `unexpected` class, various constructors, and relational operators, indicating work on fundamental data structures and error handling. The user is focused on defining the core functionality of this C++ library.
polymorphismstdcppcpp20functional-style
microsoft/vcpkg
Oct 2018 - Dec 2022
C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Package Manager Contributor
Back-end Developer & Package Manager ContributorContributions:3 reviews, 12 commits, 12 PRs in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Sy primarily contributed to adding and updating ports within the vcpkg package manager. They added new ports for C++ libraries, including tl-expected, tl-optional, CTRE (compile-time regular expressions), bitsery, tl-generator, and leaf. Their work involved writing portfile.cmake files, defining build configurations, and integrating external libraries into the vcpkg ecosystem. In addition, they updated existing ports, managing dependencies and versions for tl-ranges and the associated library.
c-plus-plussetuptoolspackage-managermacoscplusplus
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.