Hello, Roland here 👋

• I'm Roland Conybeare, a software developer engaged in continuous learning.
• Several decades of experience in the financial industry, working mostly in c++
• Trying to solve problems so that they "stay solved" -- easier said than done!

Links

• website   • linkedin •

Areas of Interest

• Developer productivity. Member of the church of emacs. Trying to write better documentation.
• Numerical programming. Kalman filters, PDE solvers, stochastic processes etc.
• Performance oriented programming. For example low-latency schedulers, some lockfree algos.
• Integration with REPL tools. Author of various scheme-based DSLs, more recently working with pybind11.

Projects

• XO: a set of cooperating c++ libraries, with python bindings, for simuation and complex event processing.

  library	pybind	hdr-only	description	outside deps
  xo-jit	xo-pyjit		LLVM jit	llvm
  xo-expression	xo-pyexpression		AST impl
  xo-websock	xo-pywebsock		websocket server	websockets, jsoncpp
  xo-kalmanfilter	xo-pykalmanfilter		linear kalman filter	eigen
  xo-process	xo-pyprocess		stochastic processes
  xo-simulator	xo-pysimulator		event-based simulation
  xo-reactor	xo-pyreactor		queueing system
  xo-reflect	xo-pyreflect		c++ reflection
  xo-unit	xo-pyunit	Y	constexpr units
  xo-ratio		Y	constexpr exact ratios
  xo-randomgen		Y	xoshiro256** rng
  xo-indentlog		Y	structured logging
  xo-flatstring		Y	constexpr strings

• nix-from-scratch: build+install nix+deps from source, without write access to /usr or /nix

• cmake-examples: progressive series of cmake examples, starting from hello world.

• docker-cpp-builder: example nix-built docker container for generic c++ builds

• docker-nix-builder: example nix-built docker container (with nix made available at build time)

• cleanmbox: automatically tidy email

• .emacs setup: terse .emacs walkthrough; includes c++ lsp setup and org-mode publishing

Currently learning about

• 2024
  • getting familiar with c++20/c++23 features; in particular constexpr, non-type template parameters, concepts.
  • getting started with SIMD vector instructions, in particular AVX2
  • getting started with llvm, via Kaleidoscope tutorial.
  • documentation using doxygen + sphinx + breathe.
• 2023
  • in-memory B-tree
  • learning how to put nix to work, in particular for projects not present in nixpkgs.
  • continuous integration using github actions.
  • custom docker containers for github CI, automagically prepared via nix.
  • diving into cmake, focusing on multi-repo builds
• 2022
  • xoshiro256**; fast RNG.
  • kalman filter using Eigen for matrix algorithms.
  • websockets
  • pybind11
• once upon a time
  • garbage collection algorithms.