Portrait
I am a co-founder and the CTO of a serverless computing company called Nimbella. I am also one of the creators and the lead technical contributor to Apache OpenWhisk, an advanced and production-ready serverless computing platform. OpenWhisk is open source, and offered as a hosted service from IBM and Adobe. It is also deployed on-prem in several organizations worldwide.

My work at Nimbella: Serverless computing (i.e., abstract distributed system at very large scale) is an area of computing that is still nascent, and lacks the abstractions, automation, and integrations that have proven necessary to accelerate the adoption of technology in new markets and application domains. Nimbella fills the technology gaps and unifies the programming experience around serverless to deliver a complete and integrated solution that works across cloud providers, including enterprise infrastructure. It is designed from the ground up to address the needs of event-based applications, long running applications, stateful workloads, and more complex use cases that use artificial intelligence and machine learning. I am excited by what our team is creating.

We are actively recruiting talented and passionate builders to join us, with expertise in distributed systems, programming languages, and compilers, as well as more generic system engineering and UI/UX. I am eager to talk to a variety of candidates. My main criteria being you are kind and respectful, passionate about learning new technologies, want to make an impact, and can code.

My work at IBM: I was a founder of the OpenWhisk effort at IBM Research and lead the design and implementation of its core architecture, tooling and runtimes. My group also operated the earliest internal offering of serverless within IBM, and our work was the genesis for IBM Cloud Functions. I worked directly with several of IBM's clients to help them become cloud-native and succeed in their adoption of serverless computing.

As the OpenWhisk project and the IBM Cloud Functions product matured, I steered my research group at IBM toward a broader agenda that encompassed programming models and tooling for serverless computing. This culminated in the Composer and the Cloud Shell, which we are available as technology previews from IBM Research. Composer and Shell enable many classes of applications in IoT, workflow orchestration, chatbots, and HPC to take advantage of the promises offered by serverless computing: no infrastructure to maintain, elastic scaling on demand, pay for what you use and not idle time.

Before OpenWhisk, I spent several years leading the Liquid Metal project, which I also helped start. It was a research effort that produced a language, compiler, and runtime for high level synthesis of reconfigurable hardware. My other contributions at IBM include computing with spreadsheets, and the content management system for all IBM Researchers.

My work at MIT: Prior to joining IBM, I spent several years as a research scientist at MIT where I contributed to StreamIt, a language, compiler and runtime for stream programming. I later developed and co-taught a multicore programming primer as MIT OpenCourseWare.

Open-Source beginnings: My contributions to open source date back to my undergraduate days, and later in graduate school. I made several contributions and supported Trimaran, a compiler and simulator for VLIW architectures. It was particularly rewarding because Trimaran was used for research by many doctoral students, and used for teaching a few compiler courses around the world.
Curriculum Vitae

Highlights
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