barrucadu

I'm Michael Walker. I also go by barrucadu.
It's like the fish, but with the vowels wrong.

What have I done in the past? See my CV.
What am I doing now? See my “now” page.
Sometimes I write things! See my memos.

Work

Government Digital Service (GDS)

Government Digital Service (GDS)

Software Engineer

Apr 2018–present

I've worked on a variety of evidence-driven improvements to the GOV.UK publishing stack, both performance improvements and also resolving long-standing technical debt. Mostly Ruby and Rails 5 / Sinatra, some Python 2. Also gave regular support to teams which did not merit a full-time developer. Most of my work for GOV.UK is open source.

Overleaf

Overleaf

Software Engineer (Part Time)

Jan–Mar 2018

Maintained legacy Rails and Java applications by fixing bugs and applying updates.

University of York

University of York

Postgraduate Teaching Assistant

2014–-2017

Marked homeworks and helped students in the undergraduate compilers, discrete maths, and introductory programming modules, and the masters-level software testing module.

Overleaf

Overleaf

Software Engineering Intern

Jul–Sep 2017

Fixed bugs, closed security holes, ported Ruby, and worked on ShareLaTeX code and data analysis after the two companies merged.

Pusher

Pusher

Software Engineering Intern

May–Aug 2016

Powering realtime with spit and glue! (or so says my mug). I worked on performant and reliable distributed systems for message delivery.

CoreFiling

CoreFiling

Software Engineering Intern

Jul–Sep 2014

Wrote a parser/renderer for an in-house wiki program using ANTLR in Java, and integrated this with JIRA.

Research

Papers

  1. Revealing Behaviours of Concurrent Functional Programs by Systematic Testing
    University of York. Ph.D thesis. 2018. [bib]
  2. Cheap Remarks about Concurrent Programs
    In Functional and Logic Programming Symposium (FLOPS '18). [bib] [doi]
  3. Déjà Fu: A Concurrency Testing Library for Haskell
    University of York Computer Science Department Technical Report YCS-2016-503. 2016. [bib]
  4. Déjà Fu: A Concurrency Testing Library for Haskell
    In ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell (Haskell '15). [bib] [doi]

Presentations & Posters

  1. Cheap Remarks about Concurrent Programs
    Presented at Trends in Functional Programming (TFP '17).
  2. Search Party: a Haskell library for speculative parallelism in generate-and-test searches
    Poster at ACM ICFP Student Research Competition (ICFP SRC '15).

Programming

Déjà Fu

Developer

2015–now

It's a library for testing concurrent Haskell programs, which came out of my Ph.D research. Pretty much everything is supported, plus a few extras.

Comes with HUnit and Tasty bindings, so you can easily integrate it with your existing testsuite.

Arch Hurd

Project Leader

2010–2015

I accidentally started a GNU/Hurd distribution based on Arch Linux. This was completely unintentional.

Served my time as project leader from 2010 to 2015, managing a handful of developers around the world porting over Linux software. I also produced installation media and maintained the website and repositories.

Uzbl

Developer

2009

I was one of the first few developers, and this is the project that taught me C and Git. It was fun, and I learned a lot. I still host the website and mailing list.

Do not expect good code if you go and dig up my contributions.