Willem Palenstijn
Research Software Engineer at Leiden University
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWillem Palenstijn is a Research Software Engineer with 26 years of experience at the intersection of mathematics and scientific software, currently based in Amsterdam and working at Leiden University. He combines a PhD in Mathematics with long-term roles developing and supporting research software at CWI, University of Antwerp and Leiden, bringing deep domain knowledge to reproducible, high-quality code. Willem is a pragmatic back-end engineer who has contributed to notable open-source projects such as GemRB, where he fixed subtle sprite-rendering bugs and addressed buffer overflows—an example of his attention to low-level correctness in complex systems. He excels at bridging academic research needs and production-grade tooling, often tackling tricky encoding, rendering and numerical edge cases that others overlook.
26 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Mathematics, PhD, Mathematics at Leiden UniversityStedelijk Gymnasium Leiden
Github Skills (12)
c-language10
engine10
cpp10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
game-engine10
cplus10
render10
game-dev10
sprite10
sdl9
isometric8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
gemrb/gemrb
Feb 2009 - Feb 2015
GemRB is a portable open-source implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 5 pushes in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Willem primarily focused on fixing and improving the sprite rendering engine within the GemRB project, an open-source implementation of the Infinity Engine. Their contributions involved resolving rendering issues related to Y-flipped sprites, off-by-one errors in the blitter, and handling of character encoding and string width calculations. The changes include refactoring the PTYPE handling in SpriteRenderer, fixing tinted blits of 8bpp BMP sprites, and addressing buffer overflows.
pythongameinfinity-enginec-plus-plusisometric
cicwi/flexTOMO
Sep 2019 - May 2022
Contributions:4 commits, 4 pushes, 2 comments in 2 years 8 months
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