(This is an old post, which is missing years and years of interesting commits from my work at the DEDIS lab at EPFL and Pie Aéronefs. But it is still a good representation of what I can do for future clients and future team mates.)
For a while now, it’s become clear that a useful and important piece of data about how a future colleague might work out is their open source contributions. While the conditions of open source work are often somewhat different than paid work, a person’s manner of expressing themselves (both interpersonally, on issue trackers for example and in code) is likely to tell you more about their personality than you can learn in the fake environment of an interview.
I am currently starting a job search for a full time job in the Lausanne, Switzerland area (including as far as Geneva and Neuchâtel) with a start date of February 1, 2024. Touching up my résumé is of course on my todo list. But it is more fun to look at and talk about code, so as a productive procrastination exercise, here’s a guided tour of my open source contributions.
I currently work with Vanadium, a new way of making secure RPC calls with interesting naming, delegation and network traversal properties. I believe wide-scale adoption of Vanadium would make IoT devices less broken, which seems like an important investment we need to be making in infrastructure right now.
- I introduced fuzz testing of the VOM decoder, which found several critical remotely exploitable crashes.
- I am working on an experimental miniature version of Vanadium in C that would be suitable for small embedded devices too small to run Go.
I have been an occasional contributor to the Go standard library since 2011. Some examples I am particularly proud of include:
- I profiled the bzip2 decoder and realized that the implementation was cache thrashing. The fixed code is smaller and faster.
- I noticed that the HTTP implementation (both client and server) was generating more trash than was necessary, and prototyped several solutions. The chosen solution was is in this checkin. This was, for a while, the most intensely exercised code I’ve written in my career; it saved one allocation per header for most headers processed by the billions of HTTP transactions that Go programs do all around the world. It was later replaced with a simpler implementation that was made possible by an optimization in the compiler. The same allocation reduction technique was carried over into Go’s HTTP/2 implementation too, it appears.
- I improved the TLS Client Authentication to actually work. I needed this for a project at work.
I wrote an MQTT server in Go in order to learn the protocol for work. It is by no means the fastest, but several people have found that the simplicity and idiomaticity of its implementation is attractive. It ships as part of the device software for the Ninja Sphere.
- I found an interesting change to reduce network overhead in the MQTT serializer I used. Copies = good, more syscalls and more packets = bad.
I worked on control software for a drone in Go for a while. It still crashes instead of flying, but it was an interesting way to learn about control systems, soft realtime systems, websockets, and Go on ARM.
I have written articles about Go on this blog since I started using it in 2010. Some interesting ones in particular are:
I am also active on the Golang sub-reddit, where I like answering newbie requests for code reviews. I also posed a challenge for the Golang Challenge.
My earliest open source project that’s still interesting to look at today was a more scalable version of MRTG called Cricket. Today tools like OpenTSDB and Graphite are used for the same job, it seems. Cricket still works to the best of my knowledge, but development is dead because of lack of interest from users. Cricket is written in Perl.
My earliest open source project was Digger, from Bunyip. If you can unearth archeological evidence of it from the 1996 strata of the Internet geology, you’re a better digger than I am. It was written in C.
Leave a Reply