Talks & Publications

I enjoy speaking! Here are some of my talks and publications available online. I have not done a great job of keeping all the slides, sorry.

Talks

"Learn Nix The Fun Way" — Nix Vegas @ DEF CON 33. [Video] [Slides]
A hands-on, approachable introduction to the Nix ecosystem for beginners. I also presented this talk at PlanetNix 2025.

"[High|Low]Lights of Adopting Nix at Looker (Google Cloud)" — PlanetNix 2024. [Video]
A retrospective on the experience of integrating Nix into a large-scale enterprise environment at Google Cloud.

"A SQL Approach to Exploring ELF Objects" — SCaLE 21x, Pasadena, CA. [Video] [Slides]
An exploration of using SQL queries to analyze and introspect ELF binary files with the sqlelf tool.

"Mapping Out the HPC Dependency Chaos" — SuperComputing 2022. [Event]
A talk on the associated published paper and the tool shrinkwrap.
"Rethinking basic primitives for store based systems" — NixCon 2022, Paris, France. [Video]
I introduce some of the simple improvements one can uncover starting at the linking phase of object building and process startup. I challenge the community to take Nix further.

"Challenges with Java in a hermetic world" — PackagingCon 2021. [Video]
A deep dive into the complexities of packaging Java applications for hermetic, reproducible builds.

"Nix in the Java ecosystem" — NixCon 2020. [Video]
An early look at bridging the gap between Nix's reproducible builds and the Java development world.

"Rebuild The World: Access to secure software dependency management everywhere with Nix" — DEFCON 2025. [Event]
A panel discussion on SBOMs and how we can reclaim our services and software from vendor lockin and Docker image bitrot using Nix and NixOS.
"Bazel for Everyone? Hard Questions with Confluent Engineers". [Video]
A conversation about the trade-offs and challenges of adopting the Bazel build system.
"Tech Over Tea" Podcast Appearance. [Video]
A friendly chat about the pros and cons of using NixOS as a daily driver.
"FullTime Nix" Podcast Appearance. [Listen]
A discussion about stable linking and its implications for reproducible software.
"The Impact of AI on Cloud-Native Engineering" — DockerCon 2023. [Video]
A panel discussion on how AI is shaping the future of software development and cloud infrastructure.

Dissertation: "Exploiting Stability in Software Systems: Primitives for Fast Startup, Binary Introspection, and Explicit Dependency Control". UC Santa Cruz, 2025. [Paper] [Defense Video]
My Ph.D. research on creating new primitives for software systems by exploiting temporal and spatial stability.
"Symbol Resolution MatRs: Make it Fast and Observable with Stable Linking". arXiv, 2025. [Paper]
This paper introduces MatRs, a novel approach to accelerate dynamic linking by reusing symbol resolution results.
"sqlelf: a SQL-centric Approach to ELF Analysis". arXiv, 2024. [Paper]
Presents a new tool that leverages SQLite to enable powerful, query-based analysis of ELF binaries.
"Mapping Out the HPC Dependency Chaos". arXiv, 2022. [Paper]
An analysis of the complex software dependency graphs found in High-Performance Computing environments.