Greg Brockman

Contact

• @gdb on Twitter
• @gdb on Github
• (for the cryptographically inclined, my PGP public key ID is 45D092BC)

Interests

I love to build. I sometimes also blog.

Projects

• OpenAI, including Gym and our Dota 2 AI.
• I'm the former CTO of Stripe, helping build it from 4 to 250 employees.
• Rubysh, a Ruby subprocess library allowing sh-like syntax.
• Stripe CTF, Stripe CTF 2.0, and Stripe CTF3 (Q&A).
• Einhorn, the language-independent shared socket manager (see my Einhorn blog post for more info).
• Domaincli: register domains from the command line.
• 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).
• I somehow got roped into becoming a configatron maintainer.
• Some of my Python patches worked 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.

Interesting links

The following are a collection of technical links that I've found interesting.

• The Log. Everything you ever wanted to know about structured logs, and how to build distributed systems on top of them.
• System operation. I think this is the best (and only, really) framework I've seen on how to think about running a complex system.
• The Debian policy manual. It's most useful if you're already somewhat familiar with Debian packaging but want to learn Debian conventions.
• Unicode and character sets. Character sets can be confusing. This article will magically make them not be so.
• Overclocking SSL: SSL performance tuning. I found this pretty useful when initially setting up Stripe's SSL infrastructure.
• Logging best practices: A short guide for how to think about logging. I wish more software followed this article's advice.
• Git internals - Git objects: My favorite guide to the Git object model.
• On mining: A good overview of the challenges Bitcoin mining currently faces.

Writings and talks

• Testimony at the first Senate hearing on AI.
• Blog post on the Stripe perspective on Bitcoin.
• The slides from my CoinSummit 2014 talk on what a Bitcoin for the mainstream might look like.
• The video and slides from my BV.IO talk on scaling Stripe from 4 to 94 employees.
• Quora post on how Stripe got its name.
• The slides from my RubyConf AU 2014 keynote on what the Ruby community needs to change in order to remain relevant.
• The slides from my Monkigras 2014 talk on building better software through mathematics.
• The slides and video from my HNLondon talk in January 2014 on shipping at Stripe.
• The video and slides from my talk "Building a Culture Where Software Projects Get Done" at QConSF 2013. (For detailed presenter's notes, grab the original Keynote presentation.)
• Quora posts on Stripe's engineering challenges and interview process.
• The transcript of an interview I did with Airbrake on how Stripe builds software.
• Blog post on email transparency.
• The video and summary of my talk on recruiting at Stripe from the First Round Capital CTO summit in 2012.
• The slides for my talk "Running MongoDB for High Availability" at OSCON 2012. This is an updated version of my MongoSF 2012 talk.
• The slides and video for my talk "High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit" at MongoSF 2012.
• A piece in Gigaom on how we think about recruiting at Stripe.
• The slides and video for my talk "There's a Monster in My Closet: Architecture of a MongoDB-powered Event Processing System" at MongoSV 2011.

Papers

• 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 was 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.
• Apparently some chemistry research I did in high school was published.