Being An Awful Leader In A Few Easy Steps - J On The Beach 2025
A J On The Beach 2025 talk on harmful leadership patterns, engineering culture, team dysfunction, micromanagement, and project failure.
Posts
Writing, talks, and research on distributed systems, engineering, and leadership.
2025
Good Practices for Writing Temporal Workflows and Activities
Best practices for Temporal workflows and activities, including timeouts, retries, determinism, versioning, heartbeats, and worker design.
2024
Multi-Cloud: That's one small step for Temporal, one giant leap for reliability
How Temporal Cloud expanded from AWS to Google Cloud using cloud-agnostic workflows to improve reliability, flexibility, and customer choice.
Addressing Development Pains Holistically - J On The Beach 2024
A J On The Beach 2024 talk on Omni CLI, developer experience, shared commands, dependency management, onboarding, and discoverability.
2023
What if your code could be as simple as your business logic? - PyCon Sweden
A PyCon Sweden talk on Durable Execution, Temporal Python SDK, resilient distributed systems, and keeping code close to business logic.
2022
Execution trace‐based model verification to analyze multicore and real‐time systems
Research on model verification from execution traces to analyze multicore and real-time systems, detect timing issues, and reduce debugging work.
Möbius: Shopify's Unified Edge
How Shopify built Möbius to unify edge routing, TLS termination, DDoS protection, and traffic management across its infrastructure.
That Old Certificate Expired and Started an Outage. This is What Happened Next
How an expired Let's Encrypt root certificate nearly caused a Shopify outage, and what the incident taught us about TLS dependencies.
2021
Engineering Reliability and Scaling at Shopify
An interview on Shopify engineering, e-commerce scale, production engineering, and building resilient infrastructure for millions of merchants.
Engineering for Reliability: Scaling Safely in the Cloud - Dash 2021
A Dash 2021 panel on cloud reliability engineering, SLOs, outage recovery, risk estimation, and customer-visible reliability.
Automated Generation of Model-Based Constraints for Common Multi-core and Real-Time Applications Using Execution Tracing
Research on generating model-based constraints for real-time and multicore applications from execution traces and recurring event patterns.
2020
Using DNS Traffic Management to Add Resiliency to Shopify's Services
How Shopify automated DNS traffic management for service failover, regional routing, and resilient infrastructure across dozens of domains.
An Introduction to DNS Traffic Management
A practical introduction to DNS traffic management, covering TTLs, failover, routing, and resilience patterns for distributed systems.
2018
R-SHT: a State History Tree with R-Tree Properties for Analysis and Visualization of Highly Parallel System Traces
Research on R-SHT, a State History Tree with R-Tree properties for faster queries and visualization of highly parallel system traces.
2016
Runtime verification of real-time applications using trace data and model requirements
My PhD thesis on runtime verification for real-time applications using trace data, model requirements, and automated anomaly detection.
Enhanced State History Tree (eSHT): A Stateful Data Structure for Analysis of Highly Parallel System Traces
Research on the Enhanced State History Tree, a data structure for efficient storage, querying, and visualization of parallel system traces.
Detection of Common Problems in Real-Time and Multicore Systems Using Model-Based Constraints
Research on detecting scheduling, priority, and timing problems in real-time and multicore systems using trace analysis and model constraints.
2015
Linux Low-Latency Tracing for Multicore Hard Real-Time Systems
Research on low-latency Linux tracing for multicore hard real-time systems, focusing on LTTng overhead, RCU, and performance analysis.
2014
Tracing and Sampling for Real-Time Systems
A talk on real-time Linux tracing and sampling with LTTng, low-latency monitoring, multicore systems, and predictable tracer overhead.
2013
Traçage de systèmes Linux multi-coeurs en temps réel
Ma thèse de maîtrise sur le traçage Linux multi-coeurs en temps réel, l'impact du traçage sur les latences, LTTng et l'analyse de performance.
2012
High Performance Tracing Tools for Multicore Linux Hard Real-Time Systems
Research on LTTng-based tracing tools for multicore hard real-time Linux systems with low overhead and predictable latency impact.