19 entries

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

Relocatable Nix Binaries Nix Vegas @ DEFCON 34

Nix’s absolute /nix/store paths buy reproducibility at the cost of deployment flexibility. I make the case for relocatable Nix binaries, walk through the technical obstacles, and sketch what Nix could look like in environments without root or unprivileged namespaces.

Event Slides Nix needs relocatable binaries Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
How to piss off your Nix friends Nix Vegas @ DEFCON 34

A deliberately provocative argument that chasing: universal accessibility, multiple platforms, macOS support, familiarity with conventional Linux distributions, weakens Nix. I argue for diverging harder and aiming at bigger problems instead.

Event Blog post
GuixPkgs Nix Vegas @ DEFCON 34

A talk on guix-transfer, a TacoSprint 2026 project to make every Guix package importable into the Nix ecosystem.

Event Slides Guix by Nix GuixPkgs: every Guix package, as a Nix flake The Guix Nix Abomination

Learn Nix The Fun Way Nix Vegas @ DEFCON 33

A hands-on, approachable introduction to the Nix ecosystem for beginners. I also presented this talk at PlanetNix 2025.

Video Blog post

[High|Low]Lights of Adopting Nix at Looker (Google Cloud) PlanetNix 2024

A retrospective on the experience of integrating Nix into a large-scale enterprise environment at Google Cloud.

Video

A SQL Approach to Exploring ELF Objects SCaLE 21x

An exploration of using SQL queries to analyze and introspect ELF binary files with the sqlelf tool.

Video Slides

Mapping Out the HPC Dependency Chaos SuperComputing 2022

A talk on the associated published paper and the tool shrinkwrap.

Event
Rethinking basic primitives for store based systems NixCon 2022

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.

Video

Challenges with Java in a hermetic world PackagingCon 2021

A deep dive into the complexities of packaging Java applications for hermetic, reproducible builds.

Video

Nix in the Java ecosystem NixCon 2020

An early look at bridging the gap between Nix’s reproducible builds and the Java development world.

Video

Rebuild The World: Access to secure software dependency management everywhere with Nix DEFCON 33

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.

Event
Bazel for Everyone? Hard Questions with Confluent Engineers

A conversation about the trade-offs and challenges of adopting the Bazel build system.

Video
Tech Over Tea Podcast appearance

A friendly chat about the pros and cons of using NixOS as a daily driver.

Video
FullTime Nix Podcast appearance

A discussion about stable linking and its implications for reproducible software.

Listen

The Impact of AI on Cloud-Native Engineering DockerCon 2023

A panel discussion on how AI is shaping the future of software development and cloud infrastructure.

Video

Exploiting Stability in Software Systems: Primitives for Fast Startup, Binary Introspection, and Explicit Dependency Control Dissertation · UC Santa Cruz

My Ph.D. research on creating new primitives for software systems by exploiting temporal and spatial stability.

Paper Video
Symbol Resolution MatRs: Make it Fast and Observable with Stable Linking arXiv

This paper introduces MatRs, a novel approach to accelerate dynamic linking by reusing symbol resolution results.

Paper

sqlelf: a SQL-centric Approach to ELF Analysis arXiv

Presents a new tool that leverages SQLite to enable powerful, query-based analysis of ELF binaries.

Paper

Mapping Out the HPC Dependency Chaos SuperComputing

An analysis of the complex software dependency graphs found in High-Performance Computing environments.

Paper