# Nico Burns

![Nico Burns](/resources/cognition/portraits/nico-burns.webp)

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition  
Cognition  
United Kingdom

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Feb 2024
- How they joined: With Dioxus Labs (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/dioxus)
- Before Dioxus Labs: Lead Developer, Thalamos

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns
- X: @nicoburns
- GitHub: https://github.com/nicoburns
- Website: https://nicoburns.com

## Notes
- 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. (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/)
- 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.". (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/)
- Kelley wrote: "Since joining Cognition, Nico's productivity has actually increased substantially - the development of Blitz, Taffy, and Parley have been accelerating.". (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/)
- 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. (https://x.com/nicoburns/status/2109208778503819444)
- 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. (https://lib.rs/crates/taffy)
- 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. (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/)
- Cloudflare used Blitz, the native HTML/CSS renderer Nico leads, as the core engine of its agentic web browser (per the Dioxus announcement). (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/)
- Talk: 'Blitz: building a modular web engine' at RustWeek 2026; also spoke at Web Engines Hackfest 2024 ('Blitz: a truly modular, hackable web renderer'). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1KcRkV_fvk)
- 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. (https://europe2024.gosim.org/images/speakers/66424f229c41c4b4ec4f7cfb_Nico_Burns-GOSIM-sorui-2024-05.pdf)
- Public headline says "Member of Technical Staff at Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)
- 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). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)
- Education: BSc Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Bristol (2013-2016), after leaving an Oxford PPE degree unfinished (2011-2012). That philosophy training shows in his long HN comments on philosophy of mind. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)
- Previous roles include Open Source Developer / Maintainer at Dioxus Labs; Lead Developer at Thalamos; Professional development at Career Break; Lead Developer / Hands-on CTO at Circular Wave; Senior Full-Stack Developer at Somo Global; Software Developer at Toumetis; Mobile Web Developer at Mubaloo Limited. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)
- Location is United Kingdom. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Jul 2026 - Present): 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).
- Open Source Developer / Maintainer at Dioxus Labs (Feb 2024 - Jun 2026): Lead on the Blitz web browser engine, Dioxus Native the native runtime for Dioxus that it powers.
- Lead Developer at Thalamos - London, England, United Kingdom (Jun 2023 - Dec 2023): Helping to digitise the Mental Health Act and improve care for the seriously mentally ill
- Professional development at Career Break (Dec 2022 - May 2023): 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.
- Lead Developer / Hands-on CTO at Circular Wave - London, United Kingdom (Mar 2019 - Nov 2022): 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.
- Senior Full-Stack Developer at Somo Global - Bristol, United Kingdom (Sep 2017 - Sep 2018): 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.
- Software Developer at Toumetis - Bristol (Jul 2016 - Jul 2017): 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.
- Professional development at Career Break - Bristol, England (Sep 2013 - Aug 2016): Completed a 3-year undergraduate degree in Maths & Philosophy

Developed what would now be called Progressive Web Apps (but long before that term was coined): responsive, offline-first web apps. Using then-emerging technologies like App Cache manifests, local storage, and media queries. As well as more mundane tools like Backbone, jQuery, SASS, and Grunt.
- Web Developer at Self-employed (Jun 2009 - Dec 2012): ALWAYS BE CYCLING (2011)
• Informational website and booking system for a local cycling charity.
• Custom PHP/MySQL CMS + booking system
• Visual design, branding, and content creation.
• Liaised with client to determine requirements.

TONY WORDS (2009)
• Fixed CSS to work with non-IE browsers.
• Updated page content (semantic HTML)
• Factored out duplicated common page elements using PHP

## Education
- University of Bristol - Bachelor of Science (BSc), Mathematics and Philosophy - (Jan 2013 - Jan 2016)
- University of Oxford - BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (unfinished) - (Jan 2011 - Jan 2012)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoburns
- https://github.com/nicoburns
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1KcRkV_fvk
- https://lib.rs/crates/taffy
- https://www.olympiad.org.uk/2013/index.html
- https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/joining-cognition/
- https://x.com/nicoburns
- https://europe2024.gosim.org/images/speakers/66424f229c41c4b4ec4f7cfb_Nico_Burns-GOSIM-sorui-2024-05.pdf
- https://x.com/nicoburns/status/2109208778503819444


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/nico-burns · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people