Hello, my name is Rick Winfrey. I work at GitHub on the Blackbird team focused on lexical and semantic code search. To do this at GitHub scale on the order of 100+ million repositories is a very interesting and complex distributed systems problem! You can read more about our technology and approach here.

I love programming languages and programming language theory, and program in several languages including Rust, Golang, Ruby, Python, Haskell, Erlang / Elixir, SQL, and JavaScript / TypeScript. My preference is for languages with rich type systems. I have a deep appreciation for the lambda calculus, combinator theory, type theory, and functional programming.

I'm currently a graduate student working towards completion of a MSc in the Software Engineering Programme at Oxford University. I expect to complete the program in May 2026.

Outside of software engineering I enjoy woodworking, surfing, and cooking Napoletana-style pizza. Thanks for stopping by!