I like to design, build, and run good* software systems and help others do the same. I specialize in taking complex systems that work and making them better and simpler while keeping them working.
* - useful, robust, reliable, secure, scalable, maintainable, efficient, etc.
Experience
Founded Triple Pat, a SaaS company dedicated to providing SREs with confidence that the reason their alarms are silent is because the systems are working, not because the alarm system is down. Wrote webservice and distributed high-availability DB. Deployed across multiple clouds and continents. Wrote Android and iOS applications.
- Languages
- Go, Shell, Swift, Kotlin, Node, Javascript
- Technologies and Skills
- IaC, cloud services, mobile development, CRDTs, distributed databases, devops, gitops, SRE, AI, prompt engineering, SSG, CI/CD, Docker, Tailscale, GCP, AWS
C++ developer in charge of the market information software stack encoding and transferring market data from point of receipt to the systems that make trading decisions. Responsible for 10% of deployed binaries and libraries used by more than 25% of production systems at 1000+ person company. Refactored the decade-old information stack to increase flexibility and efficiency without forcing change on existing users. Held all work to high efficiency standards, as wasted microseconds meant real monetary loss. Also did critical work on: the metrics system; the logfile and packet-capture pipelines; the ETL system; and addressing packet loss in intra-datacenter multicast feeds. Taught new-hire orientation classes in networking, multicast, and market information processing.
- Languages
- C++, Python, Bash
- Technologies
- Userspace networking, multicast, CI/CD, TCP, Linux kernel networking, protocol buffers, code generation, software transactional memory, multiprocessing, performance analysis
Became tech lead of the Measurement Lab project (a Vint Cerf-founded Google partnership with external non-profit Code for Science and Society — https://measurementlab.net) when the project was six years old. Wrote the project mission, aligned the team with the mission, and designed and developed software as a team in pursuit of that mission. Stewarded the world's largest open database of Internet performance data (kept it open and grew it from tens of terabytes to more than 2 PB). Grew the daily test volume from 15000 tests/day to millions, in large part by launching the "how fast is my internet" feature to Google Search. By 2021, every day at least one of 1000 internet users used the speed test and contributed data. Was responsible for the entire stack, from the bill of materials at each datacenter and wiring diagrams for remote hands, up through Kubernetes with custom plugins and the measurement services we ran, all the way up to the ETL pipeline that made the data available to the public. Performed outreach to encourage data use and to get measurement racks into third-party colocations across the world.
- Languages
- Go, Python, C, C++, Java, Shell, Javascript, Jsonnet
- Technologies
- Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Google Cloud, TCP, Linux kernel internals, SQL, Bigquery
- Open source software designed and written
- NDT-server, packet-headers, uuid, uuid-annotator, pusher, index2ip, scraper, and many more at https://github.com/m-lab/
References
References available upon request.
Academia
Hired as an assistant professor and as the first who was only a computer scientist. Helped the Mathematics and Computer Science Department transition into two departments: the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science Department. Was a founding member of the newly-formed computer science department.
- Courses Taught
- Algorithms, Software Engineering, Object-Oriented Design (in Java), CS1 (in Python), CS2 (in C++), Operating Systems, Mobile Development, Independent Study in Reversible Computing, Independent Study in Program Visualization, and Calculus
- Student Achievements
- Coached the IEEE MicroMouse team that won the competition. Coached Manhattan College ACM Programming Contest team. Found external clients with real-world problems for students in Software Engineering, and helped students work with those clients. Published multiple research papers with undergraduate student co-authors.
Dissertation
- Title
- Measuring the Internet AS Graph and its Evolution
- Advisor
- Andrzej Proskurowski
- Description
- Is traffic on the Internet centralizing or decentralizing over time? How robust is the Internet to various forms of political attack? To solve this problem I processed terabytes of data, proved problems to be NP-complete, and discovered and developed approximation algorithms for those problems. I found that Internet traffic is not decentralizing over time.
Graduate School
- Network Services
- Wrote (in Perl) some tricky algorithmic parts of NetDOT.
- Beyond BGP Project
- Analyzed piles of traceroute data to assess the stability of Internet routes. Analyzed piles of BGP data to determine how commonly IP address hijacking occurs.
- Contests
- On the winning team of the departmental programming contest every year I entered (6 years in a row).
- Taught
- Instructor for Data Structures lab and Advanced Python Programming. Teaching assistant for many other classes.
Ancient History
Gordian, Costa Mesa, California
Software Engineer
2000 – 2002
Wrote a GUI, in Java, which configured headless network devices.
Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California
BS / Joint Major in Mathematics and Computer Science
1996 – 2000
Publications
- P. Boothe and J. Langke, People and Computers Agree on the Complexity of Small Art, BRIDGES, pp. 43-50, . (https://github.com/pboothe/KComplexity)
- L. Evans, P. Boothe, and A. Baez, Predicting Morbidity and Mortality for a Saguaro Cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) Population, The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society, vol. 140, no. 3, .
- P. Boothe, Is Internet traffic becoming less centralized over time?, TinyTOCS, vol. 1, . (https://github.com/pbailis/tinytocs-site/blob/master/vol1/papers/tinytocs-v1-boothe.pdf)
- P. Boothe and S. Badame, Animation of Object-Oriented Program Execution, BRIDGES, pp. 585-588, .
- S. Badame and P. Boothe, Drawing Trees and Animating Tree Changes, Congresssus Numerantium, vol. 202, pp. 75-85, . (https://github.com/pboothe/Lispy-Animator)
- P. Boothe, Using cell phone keyboards is (NP) hard, FUN with Algorithms, vol. (LNCS) 6099, pp. 53-67, . (https://github.com/pboothe/not9)
- P. Boothe, Z. Dvorzak, A. Farley, and A. Proskurowski, Graph Covering via Shortest Paths, Congressus Numerantium, .
- J. Hiebert, P. Boothe, R. Bush, and L. Lynch, Determining the Cause and Frequency of Routing Instability with Anycast, Proc. of Asian Internet Engineering Conference 2006, vol. LNCS 4311, pp. 172-185, .
- R. Libeskind-Hadas, J. R. Hartline, P. Boothe, G. Rae, and J. Swisher, On Multicast Algorithms for Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, (special issue on cluster and network-based computing), vol. 61, no. 11, pp. 1665-1679, .