Zach Toogood
Owner & Director at Open Source
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZach Toogood is a seasoned C++ engineer and founder based in London with 11 years of experience building backend systems, SDKs, and cross-platform native code. He runs his own consultancy while contributing heavily to open-source game server emulators—most notably 4,000+ commits to the LandSandBoat/FFXI ecosystem—demonstrating deep expertise in server logic, database engineering, and performance profiling. Zach has delivered production-grade features at companies like Mapbox, Splunk, and Yousician, focusing on offline caching, search/indexing support, and real-time audio and risk systems. Comfortable across the full stack of backend, database, and native client work, he blends pragmatic engineering with gameplay-aware design decisions (e.g., party XP penalties and fishing subsystems). His work shows a pattern of fixing complex domain bugs and improving tooling and observability, such as integrating Tracy profiling and enhanced logging.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Systems Engineering (BEng Hons), Bachelor's Degree, Computer Systems Engineering (BEng Hons) at University of Kent
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (20)
c-language10
gameplay10
packet10
gameserver10
implement10
ff10
lua10
mechanics10
sql10
database-design10
ffserver10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
server10
debug9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
LandSandBoat/server
May 2021 - Jan 2023
:sailboat: LandSandBoat - a server emulator for Final Fantasy XI
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2536 reviews, 1099 commits, 2115 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Zach contributed to the Final Fantasy XI server emulator by implementing and modifying client-side features. Their work primarily focused on the addition of titles, and text ID shifts, involving direct modification of the Lua scripts for client-side game mechanics. These changes demonstrate involvement in gameplay mechanics and the server's interaction with client-side text management. The user also added extra validation to SmallPacket0x04D and worked on implementing functionality to the fishing subsystem, and a tool for announcing server messages.
luaemulatorserver-emulatorc-plus-pluslandsandboat
project-topaz/topaz
Feb 2020 - Nov 2020
Server emulator for FFXI
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:23 releases, 266 reviews, 992 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Zach implemented SQL changes related to Rhapsodies of Vanadiel, adding, modifying, and deleting data in the `npc_list`, `mob_skills`, `mob_groups`, and `mob_spawn_points` tables. These changes appear to involve updating and correcting NPC data, character skills and group information, and spawn points for various in-game mobs. Additionally, the user worked on the implementation of getJobLevel() and hasJob() bindings in `lua_baseentity.cpp` demonstrating back-end logic development.
emulatorffxiserver-emulator
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