Richard Low
Software Engineer at Apple
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Low is a seasoned software engineer with 19 years’ experience building distributed systems and analytics platforms, currently working at Apple. He combines academic depth—a PhD in Computer Science and advanced degrees from Cambridge—with startup leadership at SwiftKey and Acunu, where he led analytics teams and customer-facing delivery on Cassandra-based systems. Focused on making data accessible and useful, he specializes in backend performance engineering and has made notable open-source contributions to the high-profile swift-nio project, including a 2x speedup for WebSocket masking and ByteBuffer optimizations along with added benchmarks. Based in the UK, he brings a pragmatic blend of low-level optimization, systems design, and product-minded delivery, often catching subtle production risks early.
19 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Bristol UniversityMA, Physics, Computer Science, MA, Physics, Computer Science at Cambridge University
Stackoverflow
61reputation
9kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (17)
asynchronous10
non-blocking10
async10
testing10
bytebuffer10
event-driven10
performance-optimization10
swift10
high-performance10
websocket9
websockets9
websockets-client9
websocketclient9
client-websocket9
websocket-client9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
apple/swift-nio
Nov 2019 - Nov 2019
Event-driven network application framework for high performance protocol servers & clients, non-blocking.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:5 PRs, 17 comments, 1 issue in 24 days
Contributions summary:Richard made significant contributions to optimize the `swift-nio` library, focusing on performance improvements for critical components. They implemented a faster `withContiguousStorageIfAvailable` for `WebSocketMaskingKey`, resulting in a 2x speed increase. The user also benchmarked and optimized `ByteBuffer` setBytes operations, particularly for `CircularBuffer` types, and added performance tests to measure improvements. Furthermore, they addressed a potential crash by disallowing zero EventLoop threads.
swift5event-drivennon-blockingswift-servertcp
richardalow/xnjb
Sep 2011 - Oct 2012
Contributions:16 commits in 1 year
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