👋 Hi, my name is Rick Winfrey. I work at Nuanced on program analysis tools to provide code context for LLM workflows. Previously I was an engineer for ~10 years at GitHub focused on code intelligence and code search.

While at GitHub, I contributed heavily to the Tree-sitter ecosystem of language parsers, developed an experimental programming language analysis framework named Semantic, built the distributed system powering GitHub code navigation, helped implement a novel approach to name binding resolution named Stack Graphs which powered GitHub precise code navigation, added code navigation to the PR view, contributed to the initial version of GitHub's AI assistant chat service, wrote the core prompt building library to manage dynamic prompt contexts, and was a significant contributor to GitHub's code-search system named Blackbird.

My initial passion as an undergraduate student was human languages (Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean). I translated this love for languages into a love of programming languages. The majority of my career as a software engineer has been focused on building tools and services to parse and analyze source code across a wide variety of programming languages. More recently I've become interested in the problems with AI code generation within large, complex codebases, and how program analysis techniques can help provide better code intelligence context to help generate more reliable and valuable code while simultaneously reducing token usage.

I love to program and enjoy programming in a variety of languages. I've worked at a high level across system languages (Go and Rust), dynamic languages (Ruby, Elixir / Erlang, and Python), and pure functional languages (Haskell). I have a deep appreciation for the lambda calculus, combinator theory, type theory, and functional programming. I also love the challenges of working on large scale distributed systems, designing and implementing concurrent solutions, profile-guided optimization, and working on extremely large-scale systems (10k+ requests / sec).

Outside of work, I'm nearing the completion of a MSc in the Software Engineering Programme at Oxford University. I expect to complete the program in May 2026. When I'm not studying, I enjoy the planning and precision of woodworking, the physical challenge of surfing, and attempting to make a perfect Neapolitan pizza. Thanks for visiting.