Tim McGilchrist
Principal Software Engineer at tarides
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
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RockstarTim Mcgilchrist is a Principal Software Engineer based in Sydney with 14 years of experience building high-performance systems across core banking, international payments, educational games, ML, and big data. He focuses on runtimes, compilers, and distributed systems, contributing to the core OCaml compiler and runtime with low-level fixes and enhanced debugging support. Comfortable leading small, results-driven teams, Tim blends functional programming expertise (OCaml, Haskell, DAML) with practical full-stack and DevOps work on projects like CHESS replacement and Cardano DB sync. He has a proven track record shipping production systems in Java and cloud environments while also designing deeply embedded languages and ML pipelines in Haskell. An obsessive tinkerer who rewrites software to understand it, he pairs a masters-level background in operating systems and compilers with a habit of contributing to notable open-source tooling.
15 years of coding experience
Github Skills (27)
database-migrations10
debugging10
postgresql10
coffeescript10
text-editor10
editor10
emacs-lisp10
ocaml10
compiler-compiler10
cardano10
customisation10
blockchain10
compiler10
arm10
database-migration10
Programming languages (31)
Github contributions (5)
IntersectMBO/cardano-db-sync
Jul 2021 - Sep 2022
A component that follows the Cardano chain and stores blocks and transactions in PostgreSQL
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:39 reviews, 38 commits, 28 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Tim's contributions primarily center around the database synchronization component of the Cardano blockchain project. They have implemented and validated migration scripts, which involved generating checksums for database schema changes, and they have also modified build processes by integrating the generation of migration validations. Furthermore, the user made infrastructure and deployment changes, including setting up the git revision within the tools and incorporating the support for the PGPASSFILE env variable to provide flexibility for database connections.
cardanopostgresql
ocaml/ocaml
Feb 2023 - Apr 2026
The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:90 reviews, 47 PRs, 237 comments in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the core OCaml system by addressing runtime and compilation issues. They removed unused and potentially unsafe code, restored runtime parameter implementations, and fixed issues related to backtrace restoration on specific architectures (ARM64). Furthermore, the user added and updated code related to frame pointers and debugging support within the test suite. Their work focused on low-level system aspects and improving debugging capabilities.
compilerocamlfunctional-language
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