My Publications

A User-Extensible and Adaptable Parser Architecture, published in the SGAI 2008 Conference, and selected as one of the best papers from the conference. I was subsequently asked to join the Technical Stream Program Committee, and I accepted the invitation.
The best papers from the SGAI 2008 Conference were reprinted in a special edition of the Knowledge-Based Systems Journal, including a slightly modified version of A User-Extensible and Adaptable Parser Architecture (the modifications were solely to meet the publisher’s formatting requirements; the contents are unchanged from the original paper).

My M.Sc. thesis, Parsing Log Files Produced by the Postfix Mail Transfer Agent, describes the parser architecture I designed to parse log files produced by Postfix; it also describes the program I implemented based on that architecture, which parses Postfix log files, extracts as much data as possible, normalises it, and stores it in a database for subsequent analysis; it concludes by evaluating the program on the criteria of efficiency and correctness. Future work will use the database populated by the program to optimise existing anti-spam measures, test and evaluate new anti-spam measures, and identify operational and performance problems.

Interrupt Reduction Projects, co-authored by Betsy Beyer, John Tobin, and Liz Fong-Jones.

Interrupts are a fact of life for any team that’s responsible for maintaining a service or software. However, this type of work doesn’t have to be a constant drain on your team’s bandwidth or resources. This article begins by describing the landscape of work faced by Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams at Google: the types of work we undertake, the logistics of how SRE teams are organized across sites, and the inevitable toil we incur. Within this discussion, we focus on interrupts: how teams initially approached tickets, and why and how we implemented a better strategy. After providing a case study of how the ticket funnel was one such successful initiative, we offer practical advice about mapping what we learned to other organizations.