Resume

Narrative

I used to do math. Although I no longer do mathematics daily, it is the basis I use to think about programming. I enjoy solving an occasional puzzle. See “Generate All the Things” and “Notes on Paxos” articles as examples of math I like.

I am a programmer. I like writing code just for the sake of it. I like deleting code even more. I like short, simple, robust and beautiful code, which not only gets the job done, but does it in an obviously correct way. See, eg, ungrammar for an example of relatively short and self-contained piece of programming.

I am a pragmatist. The above two points sound outright scary, but don’t worry :) While I do enjoy encoding lambda calculus in types, that’s not what I spend most of my time on. I see most code as something to be replaced and re-written later, and optimise for making changes over time, not for perfection right now. This section from rust-analyzer style guide is a good example of this.

I loathe accidental complexity. I think I spend most of my time trying to make things simpler, trying to remove parts, trying to make foundational APIs more crisp. I have a visceral reaction to the gaps between how the thing should be, and how they are. cargo xtask pattern shows to what lengths I am willing to go just to get rid of the mess the unix shell is.

I build systems. Software engineering is programming integrated over time, and it’s that time dimension that really matters. The shape of the software today is determined by accidental, runaway, viral successes of yesterday. There’s a reason why VT100 interface is still programmed against today, and it is not its technical adequacy. This is not my article, but I like it so much that I’ll advertise it even in my resume. System’s thinking is why I am fascinated with Rust and not, eg, with Kotlin. Since Java with its reasonably fast managed runtime, Rust is the first PL revolution which meaningfully changes how we write software, and not just repacks known-good idioms with a better syntax (which is also important!, just not as exciting!).

I build open source communities. My biggest successes so far I think are IntelliJ Rust and rust-analyzer. I didn’t write the hardest, smartest bits of those. But I tried very hard to make sure that others can do that, by removing accidental complexity, by making contribution enjoyable, by trying to program the architecture which would be robust to time and systems effects.

More generally, I help build moderately large projects, which are combinations of all of the above: people, systematic forces, beautiful mathematical abstractions at the core, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code as a physical manifestation. See “One Hundred Thousand Lines of Rust” series for a bunch of concrete, pragmatic lessons I’ve learned so far.

I love teaching! See, for example, my Russian Rust Course (YouTube), a series of videos about rust-analyzer (YouTube), or the article about Pratt parsers.

Oh, and I love writing :-)

Contacts

Name

Alex Kladov

GitHub

https://github.com/matklad

Email

See GitHub profile

Core Competencies

• Building complex systems software from nothing
• Growing open source communities
• Implementing compilers, IDEs, build tools
• Rust mastery

Education

• 2014-2016, Masters of Software Engineering (unfinished)
  St. Petersburg State University of RAS, Russia

• 2009-2014, Specialist of Software Engineering
  St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Professional Experience