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Speedrunners and performance engineers face the same core challenge: every optimization must be weighed against its difficulty, reliability, and real-world impact on the final result. Through case studies from games like Super Metroid and Mario 64, this talk uses speedrunning as a lens to explore how engineering teams should think about balancing aggressive optimization against system stability and maintainability.
Miguel is a compiler engineer with experience in language design, performance optimization, and standard library implementation. He has worked on high-performance Protobuf C++ and Rust at Google, and is obsessed with getting the most out of hardware OEMs’ parts. He also thinks that performance should be extremely accessible and frequently writes on the topic.
Miguel is currently at Buf where, unsurprisingly, he focuses on Protobuf performance, but also high-quality developer tooling (including Buf’s Protobuf compiler frontend).
Outside of software, Miguel is an experienced digital illustrator and painter.
