About

I’m a software engineer at Joyent in San Francisco. This blog is where I write about my work, side projects outside of work, and the business and process of making software. While most of the content describes my work (first at Sun and now Joyent) and why I believe in it, my goal is to share technical ideas, not advertise for my company.

I like writing rock-solid code, especially at the system’s bedrock. So I love C, Javascript, and Unix. And having the right tools for the job.

Joyent

I joined Joyent in November, 2010 as the lead of the new Introspection team, which builds tools for observing systems in the cloud. Our Cloud Analytics tool seeks to collect and present real-time and historical performance data for distributed systems and applications for analysis by application developers and cloud operators. As part of this project, I developed the overall distributed system architecture for CA and many of the core facilities including inter-service communication using AMQP, logging, post-mortem debugging, overall system control, data aggregation, and data collection (instrumentation). Of course, we’re standing on the giants of Solaris, DTrace, and Node.js.

Fishworks (Sun/Oracle)

I joined the Fishworks engineering team in July, 2007 (fresh out of college) to work on what became the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage appliance, now called the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. The project sought to deliver a low-cost but highly reliable, high-performance enterprise network storage (NAS) appliance based on Solaris, as well as an appliance kit for quickly developing other types of appliances that need common features like a web interface, streamlined configuration, fault management, alerts, remote support, and advanced monitoring tools. The product has since incorporated many additional features like direct attached storage and certifications for important enterprise applications like VMware. My work on the team spanned a variety of areas including:

I can hardly even begin to describe how much I learned from my experience at Fishworks, both technically and personally.

Internships

In 2005 I interned at Google with the AdWords Frontend Team, working on the email system and automated testing. In 2006 I interned at Sun with the Solaris kernel team, where I worked on event ports and signals, contributing the original event port implementation for libevent.

Brown

I graduated from Brown University with a degree in computer science in May, 2007. While at Brown I worked on several projects:

Other interests

Last updated March, 2011.