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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.
Sunny is a compiler engineer with experience in language design, performance optimization, and standard library implementation. They have worked on high-performance Protobuf C++ and Rust at Google, and are obsessed with getting the most out of hardware OEMs’ parts. Sunny also thinks that performance should be extremely accessible and frequently writes on the topic.
Sunny 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, Sunny is an experienced digital illustrator and painter.
