whois Nikolai

Nikolai speaking at RustConf 2023 on compile-time code evaluation

I’m a seasoned software engineer with professional experience ranging from user interfaces to database internals to reverse engineering x86/Arm. For fun, I also design graphics, play piano, dance swing, and study language.

👋 Contact

Email: hi@NikolaiVazquez.com

Mastodon: @Nikolai@hachyderm.io

Twitter: @NikolaiVazquez

GitHub: @nvzqz

LinkedIn: @nvzqz

🤖 Software

I’m very involved with Rust, a language that helps me create robust high-performing software. This year I had the privilege to speak at RustConf on compile-time code evaluation and EuroRust on publishing high-quality crates. To improve the Rust writing process, I authored Static Assertions for compile-time checks and Divan for fast and simple benchmarking. Some more obscure but interesting projects are impls for checking trait implementations and condtype for conditional typing. Rust first caught my interest in 2017, and I’ve since made many amazing friends in the community.

🎨 Design

Graphic design is my passion. My Dribbble has a few designs, and I plan to post more of my work on this site.

If I’m walking with you in a city, I might stop mid-conversation to admire and photograph the beauty and engineering of a building’s architecture. I used to believe I would be an architect due to growing up constructing LEGO sets and designing custom Halo 3 levels. Now I’m more of a software architect.

🎹 Music

I fell in love with playing piano in 2013, when I learned to improvise jazz using the blues scale. Prior to that, my relationship with piano was casual since 2006. While I do not produce any of my own music content, I recommend (in no order) listening to:

🎻 Dance

I stumbled upon swing dance at Studenterhuset in Copenhagen on Nov 2, 2022. After experiencing a bar full of uni students dancing to jazz, I thought it would be really neat to learn to dance to music I enjoy playing on piano. Serendipitously, my Friday swing instructor in Atlanta also discovered Lindy hop at that same spot long before.

🙊 Language

I have collected 3 spoken languages. I grew up in Miami with a mix of English and Spanish (sometimes Spanglish) being spoken everywhere. Later in uni, I learned German well enough to study comfortably in Dresden for 5 months.

Tools I use are:

  • Etymonline for discovering history shared between words across languages, which helps when creating project names

  • WordReference for finding words with a specific connotation

  • Google Translate for translating images

  • Verbformen for German conjugation

🌐 Site

I built this site using the following tools: