- Joined Cognition
- Sep 2026
- How they joined
- With Dioxus Labs
- Before Dioxus Labs
- ThalamosLead Developer
- Status
- Current
- Joined Cognition in 2026 when Dioxus Labs (YC- and Khosla-backed, $3.5M raised) joined Cognition to accelerate Devin; the team keeps building Dioxus, Blitz, Taffy and Subsecond.Sep 10, 2026
- Dioxus founder Jonathan Kelley's announcement names him explicitly: "Our lead engineer on Blitz, Nico Burns, will be devoted full time to maintaining and improving Dioxus.".Sep 10, 2026
- Kelley wrote: "Since joining Cognition, Nico's productivity has actually increased substantially - the development of Blitz, Taffy, and Parley have been accelerating.".Sep 10, 2026
- Tweeted on Oct 11 2026: "Much faster CSS Grid coming to Taffy soon". Tweeted on Oct 21 2026 that "Blitz (and also Servo) layout performance is looking very promising", while noting the benchmark harness was vibe-coded. Layout performance is his current focus.Oct 11, 2026Much faster CSS Grid coming to Taffy soon (https://t.co/36V3uyLu63) https://t.co/u1WxN3rjUK
- Taffy, the layout library he leads, implements CSS Block, Flexbox and Grid, gets about 3.28M downloads per month and is used in 2,630 crates, including Servo.Oct 2026
- The deal origin: Cognition's Devin CLI terminal renderer is built with Dioxus, which led to an office demo and the team joining. Nico's Blitz/Dioxus-Native work therefore sits close to a dependency in Cognition's own stack.Sep 10, 2026
- Cloudflare used Blitz, the native HTML/CSS renderer Nico leads, as the core engine of its agentic web browser (per the Dioxus announcement).Sep 10, 2026
- Talk: 'Blitz: building a modular web engine' at RustWeek 2026; also spoke at Web Engines Hackfest 2024 ('Blitz: a truly modular, hackable web renderer').May 2026
- At GOSIM Europe 2024 (State of Rust UI, May 6 2024) he described himself as a full-stack developer for about 15 years who had used Rust since about 1.0. He listed his work as DioxusLabs' Blitz, Taffy layout, Servo modularisation/layout, and the blessed.rs curated crate directory.May 6, 2024
- Public headline says "Member of Technical Staff at Cognition".
- Work history per LinkedIn: Open Source Developer/Maintainer at Dioxus Labs (2024-2026), Lead Developer at Thalamos (2023), Lead Developer / Hands-on CTO at Circular Wave (2019-2022), Senior Full-Stack Developer at Somo Global (2017-2018), Software Developer at Toumetis (2016-2017), Mobile Web Developer at Mubaloo (2013), self-employed web developer (2009-2012).
- A polyglot software engineer, focussed on web technologies (both using and creating them). I have extensive experience with a number of different languages and frameworks across both frontend and backend development including JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, PHP, Python, Node.js, React, React Native, Angular 2, and Laravel, and a more limited amount of experience with supporting skills such as UX design and DevOps; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning.
A continuation of my previous role leading on the Blitz web browser engine, Dioxus Native the native runtime for Dioxus that it powers (Dioxus Labs was acquired by Cognition).
Lead on the Blitz web browser engine, Dioxus Native the native runtime for Dioxus that it powers.
Helping to digitise the Mental Health Act and improve care for the seriously mentally ill
Took 6 months out to work on Taffy. Taffy is a high-performance 2D layout library (in Rust) implementing CSS Layout algorithms similar to the Yoga library that powers React Native. Amongst other things I have: • Contributed a CSS Grid implementation (from scratch, following the CSS specification) • Contributed significant performance and correctness fixes to the Flexbox implementation • Become a maintainer and the primary contributor, driving overall project direction and reviewing the contributions of others.
This was primarily a hands-on software engineering role. But it also included responsibility for product, design, and leading a small team of junior developers. Additionally, I was the most senior technical employee in the company, reporting directly the CEO. TECH: TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, React, React Native. ACHIEVEMENTS • Reduced developer time spent dealing with customer support issues and post-release bug fixes from ~50% of developer time to almost zero, by introducing robust error handling/ reporting, code review, and static checks (TypeScript). • Spearheaded an incremental migration of the primary datastore from Firebase to Postgres, significantly improving reliability (due to typed schema and transactions), product flexibility (due to more powerful querying capabilities), and performance (due to improved ability to batch operations). The migration took place gradually over two years, and feature velocity was maintained during this process. • Optimised a complex timezone-aware payment rate system to run 1000x faster. Enabling a much faster development cycle and more rigorous automated testing.
Built a Mobile Device Management product for the banking sector using a PHP/Laravel backend and a TypeScript/React admin portal. Our application was praised by the clients for its reliability and seamless operation.
Architected and then helped to implement the migration of an analytics product from a monolithic C++ application (that used its own bespoke in-memory database) to a modular solution consisting of a Rust ingestion pipeline, an Amazon Redshift database, which was exposed over a Python based HTTP API. And helped convert the jQuery frontend to Angular2. Worked on a variety of hybrid (mixed web and native code) mobile applications, writing code in JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, and Objective-C.
Completed a 3-year undergraduate degree in Maths & Philosophy
The benchmark harness is vibe-coded, so take these results with a pinch of salt. But Blitz (and also Servo) layout performance is looking very promising. https://t.co/STlLSfneLI
Much faster CSS Grid coming to Taffy soon (https://t.co/36V3uyLu63) https://t.co/u1WxN3rjUK
BBC's micro:bit is shaping up to be awesome. Now with python. https://t.co/GuyF43rQji
MIT's creates MicroMasters qualification for it's MOOCs! MIT seem to be way ahead of anyone else in this space... http://t.co/RHHfBm7wE8
From the CEO of Google: The way you build great products is SMALL TEAMS with strong leaders http://t.co/Y9fqwtfpSD
Exciting news! (or not). I've decided to start actually tweeting. Expect articles and commentary on political, social and technology issues.
Here's hoping! Mozilla and Samsung would have a very real chance of making an open computing platform a reality http://t.co/nKbZOsCUkB
I love my design textbook.
Now teeting from google wave.
@WeskGear would love a google wave invite!! #googlewave #wave #YesPlease!
http://www.jackandjilltoyshop.co.uk/ - Traditional, family run, toyshop based in Totterdown, south Bristol (uk)
http://www.tonycoll.co.uk - Bristol (uk) based media training and consultancy
