Felix S Klock II
Felix is a Principal Software Engineer at
Amazon Web Services.
He used to live in Paris, but his French is poor.
Il a habité à Paris, mais son français n'est pas bien.
Pre-history: Felix received a Bachelors
degree in 2000 and an M.Eng in 2001, both in EECS from MIT.
After graduating from MIT, he worked at Green Hills Software.
Then he returned to Boston to pursue a Ph.D in Programming Languages at
Northeastern University's
College of Computer and Information Science.
Near the end of his Ph.D work, he joined Adobe to
work on the
Actionscript Virtual Machine.
Felix subsequently joined
Mozilla Research,
and began his work on Rust, which eventually
led to his current role at Amazon.
On advice
To everyone who told me that I should not start a new job until after I defend
my thesis: you were right.
(To the one person who told me that
I should wait to join my wife, far from university,
until after I defend my thesis: you must have been wrong,
because I cannot imagine life any other way.)
Rust
Rust is a new exciting systems programming language.
Rust combines the speed and low-level access provided by C with safety
surpassing that provided by memory-safe languages like Java.
How is Rust more safe than Java? Because in addition to ensuring
memory safety, Rust guarantees programs are data-race free,
eliminating a swath of bugs that plague programs for parallel
processors.
In addition, Rust has a strong community culture. From the start,
the project has actively worked to foster an
open and
welcoming environment, encouraging programmers of all
backgrounds (from catagory-theory nerds to script-kiddies to grey
beards) to come join us and help save the world from segmentation
faults.
Presentations
Videos:
Also:
slide decks of these and other presentations.
Teaching
In Fall semester of 2009, Felix was a teaching assistant
for
CS 5010,
(which was just a renaming of CSG 107: "Program Design Paradigms"),
again taught by Professor Matthias Felleisen.
In Spring semester of 2009, Felix was a teaching assistant
for CSU 211,
taught by
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt.
In Fall semester of 2008, Felix was a teaching assistant
for
CSG 107,
taught by Professor Matthias Felleisen.
In Spring semester of 2008, Felix taught
CSG 111,
in concert with Professor
Will Clinger.
CSG 111 is also known as Principles of Programming Languages.
Felix enjoys the
objects lecture he gave
in that course (and recently updated for a guest lecture
in CSG 711).
In Spring semester of 2006,
Felix taught CSU 211
as an instructor of record.
CSU 211 is also known as Fundamentals of Computer Science I.
Felix was a teaching assistant for CSU 211
(taught by Professor
Felleisen)
in the Fall semester of 2005 and
in the Fall semester of 2003.
When he was at MIT, Felix was a teaching assistant for
6.170,
Laboratory in Software Engineering, for
the
spring 2000,
fall 2000,
and
spring 2001 semesters.
Research
Felix currently researches garbage collection with bounded pause times
via heap partitioning.
He is using the
Larceny implementation
of the Scheme programming language as the basis for his experiments.
In Summer of 2009, Felix was co-author on
a paper
about Regional Garbage Collection
and the mathematics behind its work scheduling policies.
In Spring of 2008, Felix completed his
comprehensive exam.
Felix presented
Larceny's FFI
at
Scheme Workshop 2008.
More generally, Felix is interested in language implementation
issues, such as compiler technology and runtime system design.
Felix is also interested in tools for program understanding
and for assisting in software development.
Development Projects
Felix is one of the developers of
Larceny
(credit for the design and implementation of Larceny
should be attributed to
Lars T Hansen
and Will Clinger).
Felix recently made renderings of the state machines for Larceny's
lexer.
Larceny was the foundation upon which Felix built his thesis work.
Felix has collected bookmarklets: little snippets of javascript that
act on whatever webpage your browser is currently focused on.
The first ones he had seen did things like
post urls to other sites (such as the "Post to del.icio.us" bookmarklet);
but in fact there are more useful private ones that do things like
make named anchors in a page explicit in the rendering of the document.
Felix contributed to the development of the
Green Hills compiler infrastructure
while he was employed there.
He no longer remembers what else he is allowed to say about his
contributions to their compiler.
But he does remember that Santa Barbara is a beautiful city.
Felix contributed to the development of the
FLEX compiler infrastructure.
Under the supervision of
Alan Wexelblat,
Felix contributed to the development of the Footprints,
a tool for collecting and interactively presenting information about
the collective browsing activity of a community.
Sadly the project website is no longer up; more information is available
at Alan's website.
Life
Felix enjoys skiing
and cooking.
He also likes teaching. As an example: his attempt
to make a "one page" Javascript tutorial
(possibly doomed to failure) aimed at one of his nephews.
Since then, Felix has tried at various times to promote Literate Programming,
developing tools that encourage one to treat source code as art,
such as tango and
mon-artist.
Felix also wrote a Subversion tutorial
that is meant to illustrate a particular work flow and how state
propagates between subversion users and the central repository.
His brother Anson and Anson's wife Jenny are starting
a food and wine boutique named
Picnic in Seattle, WA.
Felix became a father in the summer of 2016. His children do not yet, to his knowledge,
know the λ-calculus.
Content last updated: 2 December 2020
