PhD update

I didn't blog for a while, and realised today my last post is almost one year old. So what happened?

Research

I'm now in the second half of my PhD, and I think it's going well. A paper I've co-written has been accepted in the Middleware 2016 conference.

This paper presents an optimization in distributed stream processing engines, by identifying in real time correlations in the flowing data, in order to improve the locality on the different workers. I hope I'll find time to dedicate a post to explain it further.

Not related to my PhD, I've also co-written my first journal article, presenting the Debsources Dataset: a set of tarballs containing all the deduplicated source code of Debian, spanning more than 20 years of free software packages. An SQL database comes along, archiving lots of metadata about the code. It's about to be published in Empirical Software Engineering, and you can read the PDF here.

Teaching

Last year I was teaching "Introduction to Linux" and "Introduction to web development", while this year I switched to more systems oriented courses: "Concurrent and distributed programming", and "Operating systems".

Debian

I'm very happy to have become a Debian Developer, after DebConf16 in Cape Town, South Africa. Fellow hackers convinced me it was time to apply, which I did. I regret I didn't have much time since then to contribute more to Debian, but I will have more since my teaching assignments will scale down from now on.