Meet Tiago Cerqueira

Summary: Tiago Cerqueira

Tiago Cerqueira is a Portugal-based software engineer focused on systems programming, Rust, performance, concurrency/async programming, and infrastructure. His portfolio presents him as a Rust-oriented engineer with prior experience at Deno Land, BitFashioned, and Critical TechWorks/BMW, and notes that he is currently looking for work.

His site has a playful Windows XP desktop aesthetic and is itself a technical project: the dotdev portfolio is built entirely in Rust, statically generated with Leptos, hydrated to an interactive WASM frontend, styled with Tailwind and XP.css, and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

What he works on

Tiago’s strongest themes are:

• Rust systems/backend work
• Async/concurrent programming with Tokio
• Performance-sensitive software
• Distributed systems and infrastructure
• C/C++ interoperability and memory-safety topics
• Cryptography-related backend work
• Compilers/interpreters as a learning interest

On the homepage, he describes his programming path from C and C++ into Java, TypeScript/web development, and then Rust. He is especially interested in elegant engineering, maintainable solutions, and leveraging language paradigms well. He says he has worked with Rust for roughly three years and is currently interested in distributed systems, after reading Database Internals and reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

Professional background

On the work page, he lists:

• Deno Land — Infrastructure Engineer
  Worked on Deno Deploy, including co-authoring an internal globally distributed key-value store for deployment state and contributing reliability, control-plane, feature, and bug-fix work. Technologies listed include Rust, Tokio, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, TypeScript, Fresh, SQL, and Postgres.

• BitFashioned — Fullstack Developer
  Lead developer for a department working on cryptographic solutions and applications. He built production Rust services, Rust backends, frontend work with SolidJS, and maintained AWS infrastructure.

• Critical TechWorks — Fullstack Developer
  Worked on BMW next-generation car head-unit audio software, including a hardware abstraction layer, Android service, and Android audio settings application. He also drove an internal Rust initiative for C++ codebases.

He studied Electrotechnical and Computer Engineering at FEUP, majoring in Automation and Robotics.

Projects

Notable projects from his portfolio include:

• dotdev — the portfolio site itself, built with Rust, Leptos, WASM, Tailwind, XP.css, and Cloudflare Pages. Source is linked as github.com/tcerqueira/dotdev.

• Lox interpreter / lorax — a Rust implementation of the Lox language from Crafting Interpreters, with a browser/WASM launch option. Source is linked as github.com/tcerqueira/lorax.

• Gotcha — a CAPTCHA alternative using Rust, SolidJS, PostgreSQL, AWS Lambda, proof-of-work, interaction analysis, and browser fingerprinting. Source is linked as github.com/tcerqueira/gotcha.

• Zanzibar — a cryptography/performance project evaluating a novel cryptographic paper for private iris comparisons, involving large data sizes, serialization costs, and optimization work. Source is linked as github.com/tcerqueira/zanzibar.

• susync — a small Rust crate for bridging C++ callback APIs to async Rust in a runtime-agnostic way. It is published on crates.io.

• Data glove master’s thesis — a real-time hand-pose tracking glove built from sensors, microcontroller firmware, and a Unity simulation.

Writing and interests

His blog currently contains one technical post: “Fil-C and Rust: Where’s the safety at?”. The post compares Rust’s compile-time memory-safety model with Fil-C’s runtime safety approach, discussing tradeoffs around undefined behavior, panics, data races, escape hatches, and performance costs. It reinforces his interest in Rust, C/C++, memory safety, and language/runtime design.

Outside programming, he mentions running, skiing, football, games such as Counter-Strike, Overwatch, and Outer Wilds, and reading programming books in his spare time.

Links

• Portfolio
• Work / projects
• Blog
• GitHub
• LinkedIn
• X / Twitter