Truly learning complex ideas requires struggle. To really absorb something new and change the brain, the ideas must be wrestled with, used, and reviewed. People likely can’t more do more than ~4 hours of intense, concentrated brainwork each day. Creativity requires knowledge for the unconscious brain to work with when you aren’t consciously working. Working with good people feels good. Quality…
Most presentations, especially on technical topics, suffer from simple problems. These problems can be fixed in less than ten minutes. This post is about these tips. To be clear, most technical presentations also suffer from more complicated and nuanced problems, but that’s a topic for a future post. While nominally I focus on presentations on technical topics, I think these tips can apply to…
This is a external post that I wrote for Cloudflare's blog. You can read it here .
And if they perform each of those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. - Sabrina Orah Mark, Fuck the Bread, The Bread is Over. As a PhD student, I often tried to reduce my existence down to a single number: how many papers I’d published. I’ve officially graduated now, after six years and change, so I’m reflecting on numbers like this and what they mean. Paper submissions I’ve had 13…
As I wrap up my PhD, I've been reflecting on what I wish I did differently. It's a long list, so in this post I focus on three professional things I regret. By professional, I mean specific things that would have helped me wring more value, career-wise, out of the PhD experience. But they also would have helped me stay more motivated, and probably happier, too. Disclaimer: I obtained a PhD in a…
What is a TLS certificate? What is X.509? Why do you sometimes see Your connection is not private (Chrome) and Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead (Firefox) when you visit a website? Why do you need to obtain a TLS certificate when you deploy a website? And who are these people giving out certificates? In this series, I will attempt to answer these questions and more. I will provide an…
I’ve been miserable for almost my entire PhD. Fortunately, this year (my fifth year!) things started to improve. And by things I mean my outlook, mood, and happiness levels, not my publication rate. After some reflection, I decided to record advice I never received that I wish I had, both before choosing where to go to graduate school and during my PhD itself. I believe this advice would have made…
In this post I describe Firecracker, the minimal, Rust-based virtual machine monitor used by Amazon to power AWS Lambda. I first discuss the motivation behind Firecracker, including security requirements and performance characteristics of serverless platforms today. I then discuss Firecracker in the context of existing virtualization solutions such as containers, traditional virtual machines, KVM,…
On January 9th, 2020 Mozilla announced preliminary completion of their implementation of CRLite, a research project I worked on, in Firefox. This is a big deal for the security and privacy of Firefox users. I worked on CRLite during my undergraduate years at Northeastern University with an amazing team of professors: Christo Wilson , Alan Mislove , Dave Levin , Bruce M. Maggs , and Dave Choffnes .…