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My name is Hugo. I’m a hobbyist programmer with my primary interest being writing performant code, particularly through SIMD vectorization.

My interest in programming was initially driven by a more general interest in computer graphics. Writing small scripts was useful for an artistic project of mine, but I eventually found that working on these scripts was more engaging than the project they were designed to support and over time I grew to like the idea of developing tools for the production of digital art. Although I initially spent around a year focusing on Java, I quickly moved to C++ as it was more suitable for using OpenGL and it has been my language of choice ever since. For a number of subsequent years, I focused on the field of graphics, with my personal favorite problem to explore being how to architect a rendering engine.

Around the same time I started programming, I also started familiarizing myself with the 3D computer graphics application known as Blender. Over time, I found myself gradually falling into the habit of using my graphics programming knowledge to help other Blender artists understand and make the most out of the program. Doing this for a number of years earned me some recognition within one of Blender’s online communities, a community that was eventually entrusted to me. Today, that space has grown to be one of Blender’s largest online communities, boasting more than a million members. Nowadays I no longer focus on programming graphics as much as I once did, but I maintain the habit of using my technical knowledge to help 3D artists understand and make the most of their software.

While diving into computer graphics, I developed an interest in writing highly performant code. I became fond of utilizing specialized CPU instructions, particularly SIMD instructions, and leveraging knowledge of computer architecture to maximize performance. In doing this, I became familiar with the performance that modern CPUs can offer when programmed well, but also with how difficult it is to tap into it, and how little of that potential is actually realized in practice.

These realizations inspired an interest in programming language design, particularly with how a language could be designed to better reflect the modern hardware landscape, its quirks, and its feature sets. I believe that a well-designed programming language could make it substantially easier to write code that leverages modern hardware’s capabilities, on various levels.

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