[Portrait of Patrick] Patrick Reynolds

Email: (my first name) (at) piki.org
GitHub: @piki
Mastodon: @piki@hachyderm.io
Bluesky: @piki.dev


General
I work at PlanetScale, building a simple but scalable cloud database service.

Previously, I worked at GitHub, as a distinguished engineer. I founded the Blackbird code search project, and I cofounded the GitHub Actions project. Before that, I built Spokes, which is the distributed system that stores more than 100 million Git repositories, and Governor, which performs logging and adaptive rate limiting for Git servers. I've given a public talk about Governor and Spokes.

Before GitHub, I was a software architect at BlueStripe Software, working mostly on the data collection bits in the company's application management tool, FactFinder. My work there was all about causality, asynchrony, performance measurement, and creative kernel development.

Before BlueStripe, I was a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. I worked with Gün Sirer and Fred Schneider on device drivers and BGP security (tech report, poster) in the Nexus operating system.

I got my PhD at Duke University under the supervision of Amin Vahdat and Janet Wiener. I previously earned a Master's degree at Duke and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia.

I live in Chapel Hill, NC with my wife Kristina. When I'm not busy working, I enjoy sailing, photography, hiking, skiing, cycling, and woodworking. I maintain the Oracle of Bacon. I grew up in Charlottesville, VA.

Work experience

Research
My areas of interest are distributed systems, computer networks, and operating systems, with a particular focus on monitoring and discovery. I have worked on the Nexus trusted operating system, reference monitors for user-space drivers, and BGP security. Before that, I worked on distributed systems debugging and performance analysis (Pip and Project 5), peer-to-peer keyword searching, and wide-area available-bandwidth measurement.

Publications

Teaching