Geoffrey Thomas

I'm a software engineer at MokaFive, a Bay Area startup / Stanford research spinoff that works on making enterprise computing less painful, generally with lots of use of desktop virtualization.

I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's in Computer Science (6-3) in June 2011, and am working towards a Master of Engineering. As an undergraduate, I lived in Next House, and before that I lived in Lafayette, LA.

I like computers, and in particular I like Linux, security, computational theory, virtualization, and networking. My graduate research involves applying hardware virtualization and safe languages to the problem of practical desktop application security.

As an M.Eng. student, I was a graduate teaching assistant for the following courses:

• 6.858 Computer Systems Security, fall 2011.
• 6.857 Network and Computer Security, spring 2011.
• 6.046 Design and Analysis of Algorithms, fall 2010.

I was involved with a handful of organizations at MIT, including:

• the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), MIT's student computing organization.
  • Until recently, I served as project architect for scripts.mit.edu, a user-friendly and secure wiki/blog/CGI/procmail/SVN/git/anything hosting service run by SIPB.
  • I'm one of the lead developers for the Debathena project, an implementation of MIT's Athena computing environment for Debian and Ubuntu. In summer 2009, Debathena became the official implementation of the Athena client environment.
  • I've contributed various improvements, including IRC support, to BarnOwl, an IM client quite popular at MIT, and I've helped with the XVM virtual machine hosting service.
• the MIT Cross Products, an a cappella group singing contemporary Christian music (the photo above is from a recent concert).
• the MIT Association of Student Activities, the student government group that coordinates and represents student groups at MIT.
  • I was the ASA representative to the Undergraduate Association Finance Board and Graduate Student Council Funding Board, which fund student groups.

In summers past I've worked for VMware on predicting virtual machine resource use, Ksplice with several of my friends on our initial launch, Akamai on Linux kernel security, and CSAIL as a UROP on porting Linux to a smartphone. I've also been part of MIT's College Bowl team, taught for ESP's high school enrichment classes a couple of times, sung with the MIT Chamber Chorus, danced with Tech Squares, fought with the Assassins' Guild, and served on the Dormitory Council as secretary.

I am a Christian, identifying as Methodist. This means I believe that we are inherently imperfect, fallible (“sinful”) people, to whom a gracious God freely offers forgiveness and redemption.

My MIT username is geofft, which you can use to contact me by e-mail (@mit.edu) or Zephyr (@ATHENA.MIT.EDU), or find me on Launchpad or IRC (Freenode). You may also see me go by my older username geoffreyerffoeg, especially on Google's services (Gmail, Talk, etc.), or occasionally by the metonym ldpreload.

If you're curious to see what else I've done, my resume is available in HTML and PDF, although I'm currently not looking for job offers.