Blogspot - matt-welsh.blogspot.com - Volatile and Decentralized
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Rewriting a large production system in Go 19 Aug 2013 | 04:14 am
My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go. I say "almost" because one component of the system -- a library for transcoding between image f...
Does the academic process slow innovation? 12 Jul 2013 | 10:30 am
I've been wondering recently whether the extended, baroque process of doing research in an academic setting (by which I mean either a university or an "academic style" research lab in industry) is doi...
What I wish systems researchers would work on 16 May 2013 | 10:52 am
I just got back from HotOS 2013 and, frankly, it was a little depressing. Mind you, the conference was really well-organized; there were lots of great people; an amazing venue; and fine work by the pr...
The other side of "academic freedom" 22 Apr 2013 | 03:28 am
My various blog posts about moving from academia to industry have prompted a number of conversations with PhD students who are considering academic careers. The most oft-cited reason for wanting a fac...
Running a software team at Google 9 Apr 2013 | 11:09 am
I'm often asked what my job is like at Google since I left academia. I guess going from tenured professor to software engineer sounds like a big step down. Job titles aside, I'm much happier and more ...
Looking back on 1 million pageviews 22 Mar 2013 | 09:10 am
This blog just hit one million pageviews: Seems like a pretty cool milestone to me. I never imagined I'd get so much traffic. Just for fun, here are the top five most popular posts on this blog so f...
Moving my life to the cloud 20 Mar 2013 | 10:16 am
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clspeace/2250488434/ I'm in the process of moving my (computing) life entirely to the cloud -- no more laptop: just a phone, tablet (which I use rarely) and a Chromebook ...
Grad students: Learn how to give a talk 27 Feb 2013 | 07:37 pm
I've been to roughly a hundred academic conferences and listened to thousands of talks, mostly by grad students. Over the years, the quality of the speaking and presentations has not gotten any better...
My mobile systems research wish list 28 Jan 2013 | 04:44 am
Working on mobile systems at Google gives me some insight into what the hard open problems are in this space. Sometimes I am asked by academic researchers what I think these problems are and what they...
The ethics of mobile data collection 23 Jan 2013 | 10:56 am
The mobile computing and networking research communities need to start paying closer attention to the data collection practices of researchers in our field. Now that it's easy to write mobile apps tha...
