Greg Brockman

Contact

• (for the cryptographically inclined, my PGP public key ID is 45D092BC)
• @thegdb on Twitter
• @gdb on Github

Interests

I enjoy all things that involve computers, and spend most of my time working with them. I also sometimes do mathematics.

I love to build. I also sometimes blog.

Projects

• Most of my waking hours are spent working on Stripe (as are a surprising number of sleeping hours).
• Domaincli: register domains from the command line.
• Pokebot: take the work out of getting work done.
• Embedded Mongo: a Ruby library serving as a drop-in replacement for an actual MongoDB server.
• Ruby Static Checker: statically detect name errors in Ruby.
• Anygit: Find all parents of an arbitrary Git object.
• I have a few patches in Git (my personal favorite was for an exploitable buffer overrun I found).
• Some of my Python patches are working their way through the bug tracker.
• While at Harvard, I administered and built systems for the Harvard Computer Society.
• I worked on and maintained a number of popular projects at MIT, including XVM, Linerva, and scripts.mit.edu.
• I built infrastructure for Ksplice for about seven months.

Interesting links

The following are a collection of technical links that I've found interesting.

• http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy: Debian policy manual. Contains information on the Debian standards for doing Debian packaging. I would not recommend it as a text to learn to do packaging. Rather, it's useful if you're already familiar with packaging and want to learn the details of how to do it properly.
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html: A great resource to learn about character encodings.
• http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html: I had no idea there was so much to tuning your SSL performance prior to reading this blog post. An excellent read for an engineer trying to SSL-ify a site.
• http://juliusdavies.ca/logging.html: A short guide with best practices for properly logging in your application.
• http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html: The Git object model.

Papers, articles, and talks

• The slides and video for my talk "High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit" at MongoSF 2012.
• A piece in Gigaom on how we think about recruiting at Stripe.
• The slides and video for my talk "There's a Monster in My Closet: Architecture of a MongoDB-powered Event Processing System" at MongoSV 2011.
• Sunil Abraham, Greg Brockman, Stephanie Sapp, Anant Godbole.
  Omnibus Sequences, Coupon Collection, and Missing Word Counts.
  Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability (27 August 2011), pp. 1-16.
• Greg Brockman, Bill Kay and Emma E. Snively.
  On Universal Cycles of Labeled Graphs.
  The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. Vol. 17 (2010), No. 1.
• James Brantner, Greg Brockman, Bill Kay and Emma Snively.
  Contributions to Seymour's second neighborhood conjecture.
  Involve. Vol. 2 (2009), No. 4, 385-393.
• My paper Asymptotic Behavior of Certain Ducci Sequences won 6th place in the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search. The first half of this paper was published in Fibonacci Quarterly; it can be found with the following citation:
     Greg Brockman and Ryan J. Zerr.
     Asymptotic Behavior of Certain Ducci Sequences.
     Fibonacci Quarterly. Vol 45 (2007), No. 2, 155-163.
• In high school, I had been very involved in the Chemistry Olympiad (culminating with a Silver Medal in the International Chemistry Olympiad). I took a year off before college and spent a decent chunk of it attempting to write a high school chemistry textbook, affectionately dubbed A Chemical Progression. I became distracted by computers and forgot about the book, but one day I hope to finish it.