barrucadu

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

See my CV. I also blog.

I am a Computer Science Ph.D student at the University of York in the Programming Languages and Systems (PLASMA) group, currently thinking about testing distributed systems.

I read a lot of books, I write a lot of code, and I research concurrency.

Places I've Worked

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.

go-interface-fuzzer

University of York

Postgraduate Teaching Assistant

Oct 2015–May 2016

Marked homeworks and helped students in the “Theory and Practice of Programming” first-year module.

Oct 2014–May 2015

Marked homeworks and helped students in the “Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science” first-year module.

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.

I Do Research

Concurrency is great as both a design pattern and a performance enhancer, but it can be hard to get right. Testing in particular is hard: you can't just run a program once and see what the result is.

Next I plan to try to apply some of what I've learned to distributed systems.

Conference Papers

Déjà Fu: A Concurrency Testing Library for Haskell
In ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell (Haskell '15). [bib] [doi]

Others

Déjà Fu: A Concurrency Testing Library for Haskell
University of York Computer Science Department Technical Report YCS-2016-503. [bib]
Search Party: a Haskell library for speculative parallelism in generate-and-test searches
In ACM ICFP Student Research Competition (ICFP SRC '15). Presented as a poster.

Open Source Is Good, Too

Various Projects

Sole/Main Developer

the dawn of time–now

I actively develop a variety of things.

The coolest by far is dejafu, a library for testing concurrent Haskell programs, which came out of my research.

Second place goes to logdb, a performant and reliable log-structured database in Go.

I also maintain a few Haskell IRC libraries which have actual users!

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.