Posts

For the next decade or so, the southern edge of my small home city on the north side of Zürich will be a complex linear construction site, after which we’ll have a segment of a bicycle highway between Zürich and the upper Glatt Valley, and a mostly-brand-new train station with two additional platforms connecting to a new tunnel straight to Winterthur. This is great. But in the meantime, that complex linear construction site has been placed directly over what used to be my bicycle commute, which gave me the opportunity to find a new one. ...

As a left-leaning white kid who grew up in what turned out to be a dying Southern city, going from a fully-integrated Montessori elementary school in a neighborhood named after the white flight it later suffered to an East Memphis middle school whose history includes a massive expansion of its boarding program for Little Rock families resisting integration in the 1960s, I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to point to the premature end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 as the point at which it All Went Wrong. ...

I waited long enough to write about Kein 10-Millionen Schweiz that I get to do so in the past tense, with a sense of relief, albeit incomplete. Yes, dear reader, the Swiss People’s Party ran yet another Schwarzenbach referendum to attempt to create their little island without resorting to kinetics, and despite some fear based on early polling numbers that maybe this time they’d managed to do it, with a campaign that tried (but ultimately failed) to break from their explicitly fascist house style (in the sense of “blame foreigners for everything, including the traffic caused by your own love of cars, and do it mostly with red, white, and black ink”), we will once again not be Doing A Swexit. ...

And welcome, once again to my blog, the last seven years of which seem dominated by me talking about the technical aspects of keeping my blog up to date. As I sat back and watched Claude migrate my Blogger and Wordpress content from a bitrotted Hugo template to one with an apparent present, it occurred to me that this most recent migration provides a pretty good excuse to explore what works about the Internet in 2026, and what doesn’t. ...

That people “disappear” into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it’s nearly a cliche… says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago. I didn’t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits. ...

A couple of months ago, I posted about leaving academia. Two weeks ago, I joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I’ll be working to keep bits of Google’s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least once I’ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches and levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new things to learn, but I’ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect on things a bit. ...

About three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on SCION, a secure, available future Internet architecture. Since I wasn’t around much, I was given a nice easy project that wasn’t on anyone’s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to that time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new address families it introduces). ...

Looking back over the arc of my career in pseudoacademia, especially over the last three years of digging into transport stack evolution with the MAMI project, there are a few bits of work I’m especially happy to have been a part of. One of these is the inclusion of the spin bit into the QUIC transport protocol. The spin bit was conceived as the minimum useful explicit signal one could add to a transport protocol to improve measurability, the benefit for the overhead is IMO quite worth it. Though it exposes “just” RTT, latency (together with data rate, which is available simply by counting packets and bytes on the wire in any transport protocol that is not hardened against traffic analysis to the point of uselessness) is the most important metric for understanding transport layer performance diagnosing all matter of transport-relevant network problems, and the spin signal itself can also be observed to infer loss and other issues with network treatment of a packet stream. The definition and deployment of the spin bit will therefore make network protocols more measurable while preserving privacy gains from encryption, and is a clear win for network operations and management. ...

The IETF uses Jabber for instant messaging during working group meetings, as does the IAB for its own teleconferences and meetings. Since I didn’t really feel like shopping around for a Jabber account, and XMPP integration with Google Talk shut down in the middle of the decade, I decided a few years ago to run my own server, which I pretty much only use for connecting to IETF conference rooms and for chatting with IETF folks as a backchannel during meetings. Prosody is a pretty nice piece of software, so after a little work to get it up and running (IIRC, most of this was getting used to the fact that the configuration files are written in Lua) it’s basically stayed up flawlessly since then. ...

I always love going to Schloss Dagstuhl, a retreat for computer scientists in the middle of nowhere in Saarland, Germany. It’s a little difficult to get to, but the train ride (Wallisellen to Saarbrücken via Zürich and Mannheim) is a nice, slow way to step back from whatever context-switching overhead is dominating my days at the moment and start thinking about the theme of the workshop. ...