Hey there, I'm Nikolai Vazquez!

You may know of me as knights who say nikolai on Twitter. I do exclaim "Ni!" from time to time.

I have been an open sourcerer since 2015, with my debut project Menubar Colors. It's through the world of open source that I first learned to program and eventually became the software engineer that I am today! If you're reading this, you're probably interested in helping sustain my open source work that's benefited you and thousands of others.

My Projects

I maintain many projects today with a wide range of complexity.

• Static Assertions: A Rust library that enables you ensure correct assumptions about constants, types, and more. The code that lies under the API surface is absolutely cursed and filed with dark magic. This project is what I'm most well known for within the Rust community and it has become a running joke that I'm the person to go to for wicked Rust code.

• impls: A Rust macro to determine if a type implements a logical trait expression. This enables:

  assert!(impls!(String: Clone & !Copy & Send & Sync));
  

• Ocean: A package manager focused on flexibility, performance, and community that targets macOS, Linux, and Windows. This is by far the most complex project I've embarked on and I'm extremely excited to see what becomes of it! If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to me with ideas for it.

• Bay: A content-addressable data store for Ocean that takes inspiration from state-of-the-art technologies like Git, BitTorrent, Dat, and IPFS. Its goal is to make Ocean fast and flexible with storing, retrieving, and distributing content.

• Swift Bindgen: A work-in-progress set of tools that enable Rust and Swift to play nicely together. Its name is an homage to bindgen and cbindgen. I intend to make much progress with it over the course of 2020. With your support, I can make this a reality sooner!

• Hexe: A Rust chess engine designed to be used both as a library and executable. Most chess engines are just an executable that conforms to the UCI protocol. This was my first open source Rust project and was a great way to get to know the language. I've put it down for a bit to focus on more important work but do intend to pick it back up during 2020.

• FileKit: A Swift library that makes file management simple and expressive. It wraps around Foundation's APIs to provide an interface that's much easier to use and reason about. This is by far my most starred GitHub project.

• RandomKit: A Swift library that makes random data generation simple and easy. Its initial goal was to provide Swift authors to use more random number generators than just the standard arc4random algorithm. It has since been somewhat sherlocked by the standard library.

• Menubar Colors: My first step into the world of open source! This little utility makes the macOS system color picker accessible from anywhere via the menubar, regardless of what app you're in. It enables you to pick any color from the screen and mix-and-match it with other colors.

External Projects

I've contributed and continue to contribute to prominent projects that are beyond my control.

• Rust: I have been obsessively writing Rust since 2017, with Hexe being my first real open source project to use it. Since then, I have become very active in the community and have contributed numerous changes to its standard library.

• Swift: During the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to intern at Apple where I worked on Swift: a fast, safe, and expressive language for macOS and Linux. I intend to continue to contribute to this language that's enabled me to make powerful apps for iOS and macOS.