Nicholas Collins

Summary

• Software generalist (esp. Python, Java, OCaml, Scheme/Racket, Elm)
• Experienced in dev tools, IDEs, proof assistants, git, A/B testing, functional languages
• Some experience with SQL, front-end web, android, AI, teaching/mentoring, GraphQL

Work Experience (excludes undergrad internships)

AI Trainer | DataAnnotation.tech | Remote
 November 2024 - Present (part-time, sporadic)

• Assess AI output quality, and make corrections to feed back into further training

Created educational videos | Numerade | Remote
 February 2022

• Created short educational videos showing students how to solve math problems

Software Engineer Intern | Grammatech | Remote
 June 2021 - September 2021

• Built language server in python to flag duplicate code in vim or vscode
• Can check for duplicate code across multiple files in parallel
• Open source

Mentor | Polygence | Remote
 April 2021 - November 2022 (part-time, ~1-4 hrs / mo)

• Mentored 3 high school students with ambitious software projects
• Projects ranged from easier (develop a simple game) to highly advanced (3D robot modeling, E2E messaging platform)
• Met with students via Zoom for 8-10 sessions, tracking their progress, making suggestions, and setting goals and deadlines for continued work

Teaching Assistant | University of Chicago | Chicago, IL
 April 2019 - June 2019, April 2020 - June 2020

• Held office hours to answer student questions
• Graded final projects

Software Development Engineer | Facebook | Seattle, WA
 February 2013 - August 2015

• Developed IDE plugin to support Java language enhancements for dependency injection
• Wrote script to modify over 10,000 lines of dependency injection code in 100s of files
• Owner of Android client for A/B testing framework
• Developed backend and android client for configuration system
• Conducted monthly lessons for new hires and developed presentations explaining common A/B testing pitfalls to experienced users

Other Projects

Mobile Game | in development
 August 2023 - February 2025

• Built in Godot and Python
• Pre-alpha, need income to support continued development

Zinal | Open source structure editor
 November 2015 - May 2017

• Program editor which stores programs in a SQL database rather than text files
• Capable of self-hosting: can view, edit, and compile itself
• Written in Scheme/Racket

Education

University of Chicago | Chicago, IL | July 2018 - June 2021
 Master's degree in Computer Science 

• Programming Languages Department
• Research Interests: PL Interfaces, IDEs, Proof Assistants, Synthesis, Structured editing
• Master's Thesis: "Delta Dictionaries: Total and Extensional Finite Maps in Proof Assistants"

University of Texas at Austin | Austin, TX | August 2008 - December 2012
 Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Turing Scholars Honors 
 Bachelor of Science, Mathematics: Pure Mathematics

• Computer Science GPA: 3.98
• Undergraduate Honors Thesis: “Transformation of Robot Model to Facilitate Optimization of Locomotion”
• Primary interests: AI, ML, robotics, automata theory

Publications

Filling Typed Holes with Live GUIs | PLDI 2021
Cyrus Omar, David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Ian Voysey, Nick Collins, and Ravi Chugh

Program Sketching with Live Bidirectional Evaluation | ICFP 2020
Justin Lubin, Nick Collins, Cyrus Omar, and Ravi Chugh
In Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL), Issue ICFP

UT Austin Villa: RoboCup 2012 3D Simulation League Champion | LNCS 2013
Patrick MacAlpine, Nick Collins, Adrian Lopez-Mobilia, and Peter Stone
In RoboCup-2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7500