Henrik Åkesson

About

I'm Henrik Åkesson — an independent software developer based in Madrid. I write open-source tools in Rust, and I'm building a cross-platform, peer-to-peer file-sync engine in the open.

How I got here

I've been writing software since 2000. I started out in the space industry, building catalogue and geographical-search systems for Earth-observation satellites with the European Space Agency and the French national space agency (CNES) — work that taught me to care about architecture that holds up under real performance and reliability constraints.

From there I moved into mobile, leading iOS teams and shipping apps across iOS, Android and the web. Along the way I've spent years as a team lead and architect, raised funding for my own product, and recruited and coached the team to build it.

What I'm working on

These days I work almost entirely in Rust, in the open. A few threads run through it:

  • Bridging Rust and Apple platforms. xcframework, a Cargo plugin for building Apple XCFrameworks from Rust libraries — write the hard parts once, in Rust, and use them natively everywhere.
  • Reactive Rust on the web. reactive-signals: highly performant reactive signals organised in scoped trees. I also created cargo-leptos, the build tool for the Leptos web framework, now maintained by the Leptos team.
  • Typed internationalisation. fluent-typed turns Fluent translations into typed Rust functions, so missing keys and bad arguments become compile errors. (I work in four languages, so getting i18n right is personal.)
  • A peer-to-peer sync engine. My main focus: a cross-platform, privacy-respecting alternative to the usual cloud drives, built on a single sync layer over Windows Cloud Filter, macOS File Provider, Android SAF and Linux FUSE. I'm building it in the open and writing about the engineering as I go.

Background

  • MSc, Computer Science — University of Westminster.
  • MSc, Computer Architecture, Systems & Networks — Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
  • EU design patent — Streamline (2014).
  • I work in English, Swedish, French and Spanish.

Find me