Greg Brockman's Home Page

Greg Brockman

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.

Most of my waking hours are spent working on Stripe.
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.

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.

The slides 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.