About me

I am a developer, mathematician, editor, and writer who lives in Iceland. I grew up there, and have also lived in France, Mexico and the Netherlands.

As a developer, I am interested in distributed systems, reliability and debugging. I enjoy solving hard business problems through the use of computers, rather than using computers for their own sake. I like to understand the domain I work in, and to know and communicate with the stakeholders among my coworkers.

As a mathematician, I am interested in complex differential geometry and its applications to projective algebraic geometry. I’m also an amateur of linear algebra, and prefer deep understanding of subjects to casual acquaintance. I do a little research on the side for fun. Ask me what I’m getting wrong at the moment!

Skills

Things I know

  • Go, Java, Python, Perl, LaTeX

  • Linux, FreeBSD, Nix, Puppet, Git

  • Sqlite, MySQL, Kafka, Zookeeper

  • HTTP, JSON, Protocol buffers, gRPC

  • Graphite, Grafana, Pagerduty, ElasticSearch

  • Concurrency, parallelism, distributed systems

  • Debugging, optimization, high scalability

Things I’d like to learn more about

  • Rust, Alloy, TLA+, Erlang, Lean

Things I don’t want to work with

  • Windows on production hosts

  • Cryptocurrencies/NFTs

Associations

I’m a member of the:

  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

  • French Mathematical Society (SMF)

  • Icelandic Mathematical Society (IMS)

I have also supported Amnesty International (AI) since 2012.

Curriculum vitae

Professional experience

2022—now

Software engineer, Tern Systems. I am working on airplane separation detection in our air traffic management system in use at Keflavík airport.

2020—2022

Senior developer, Booking.com. I worked on the API modernization effort in the Accommodations Business Unit. The project I ran involves automatic conversion between legacy message formats and new ones on the edge of our network. Its purpose was to enable developer velocity during the department’s modernization efforts.

  • Defined the project scope during conversations with leadership, chose technical tools, and wrote and deployed a reusable base upon which future work by different teams can be done.

  • Collaborated with stakeholders across other teams to ensure the smooth adoption of the API adapters in a production environment.

  • Delivered a working first implementation, complete with user and developer documentation that detail how a new instance of the project can be set up and the reasons behind technical choices.

2019

Senior software engineer, Independent View. Responsible for the operations and development of trading infrastructure at a hedge fund. Working on Python, Java and Scala systems deployed on Windows.

  • Ported existing codebase from Python 2 to 3 in time for the Python 2 end of life deadline.

  • Setup continuous integration and test lifecycles of strategies to enable stable and correct deployments.

  • Improved interactive trader system performance by orders of magnitude.

2018

Senior developer, Booking.com. From May to December 2018, I was the lead developer on a team responsible for a Golang-based Graphite frontend based on carbonapi.

  • Implemented basic infrastructure around the project; brought rollouts to the company standard, defined monitoring and alerting, wrote operational documents for on-call personnel, resolved an impasse that had blocked rollouts for six months.

  • Made numerous upstream contributions to open-source projects the company used, including gogo/protobuf, go-carbon, and zap.

  • Engaged in company-wide efforts to improve the resilience of services across all teams. Reviewed internal outage postmortems, industry lessons, and interviewed personnel to come up with a checklist that teams could use to assess their own status and see where improvement was needed.

2016—2018

Developer, Booking.com. Performed self-guided work in large existing code bases in Java, Golang, Perl and Python as a member of both autonomous and Agile-based teams.

  • Took ownership of the hotel search engine at Booking.com, a business-critical highly available distributed system, after its authors left the company. Communicated best-practices of its use to company users, ensured its capacity through the year of 2017, and provided strategies for future scaling of the system.

  • Took on other non-classical developer responsibilities as needed, including system administration at scale via Puppet and Salt, provisioning of new hardware, setup of monitoring and alerting, and communication with other teams and upper management in the absence of a product owner.

  • Gave a series of talks whose aim was to educate other developers at the company about our systems in the hope of making the boat go faster. Topics included the Booking.com hotel search engine, memory use in Java, and geometric interpretations of the average and standard deviations.

2015—2016

Associate publisher, Mathematical Sciences Publishers. Responsible for the publication of the journals Geometry & Topology and Algebraic & Geometric Topology. Also oversaw the edition and publication of Volume 18 of the conference series Geometry & Topology Monographs. This work was done remotely.

  • Stabilized the journal backlogs, making time-to-publication a known factor, enabling better communication with authors.

  • Wrote a linter of LaTeX documents customized for our editorial tasks, that was adopted by other editors while still in the prototype stage, and whose use lead to increased editor productivity.

  • Analyzed hundreds of thousands of records in our publications to estimate the value of building an in-house database of correctly formatted citations, and then argued the ROI was too low to be worth it.

  • Managed a team of remote copyeditors, ensuring quality through review and feedback cycles.

2012—2015

Copyeditor, Mathematical Sciences Publishers. Edited articles in world-known mathematical research journals like Pacific Journal of Mathematics and Algebra & Number Theory. Like other editors at the company, became an expert on TeX and LaTeX internals. This work was done remotely.

  • Top 10% performer among peer editors.

  • Took over maintenance and extension of in-house editing software.

  • Communicated with authors on final proof changes.

2009—2012

Undergraduate lecturer, Université Joseph-Fourier. Taught a course in linear algebra to first-year undergraduate students in physics and mathematics. Responsible for one class of 30 students in a batch of 150 students. All classes, homework and communication were in French.

  • Gave involved weekly homework assignments and provided detailed individual feedback on improvement points, above what was required of teachers.

  • Constructed a lecture plan from a list of topics a common final exam would question students on.

  • Wrote and graded mid-term exams in coordination with other teachers.

Education

2009—2012

Ph.D. in Mathematics, Université Joseph-Fourier, Grenoble, France. Thesis: Métriques naturelles associées aux familles de variétés Kahlériennes compactes

2007—2009

M.Sc. in Mathematics, Université Joseph-Fourier, Grenoble, France. Thesis: Géométrie algébrique, géométrie analytique

2004—2007

B.Sc. in Mathematics, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland.

Publications

Academic

  • A remark on Wu’s remark on holomorphic sectional curvature, 2022, arXiv.

  • Degenerate Hermitian geometry and curvatures of holomorphic fibrations, 2022, arXiv.

  • Cohomological expression of the curvature of Kähler moduli, 2020, arXiv.

  • Automorphisms and examples of compact non-Kähler manifolds, Mathematica Scandinavica Volume 121, 2017, 49—56. DOI, arXiv.

  • The inner product on exterior powers of a complex vector space, Linear Algebra and its Applications Volume 504, 2014, 372—386. DOI, arXiv.

  • The geometry of Kähler cones, 2012, arXiv.

  • Métriques naturelles associées aux familles de variétés Kahlériennes compactes, Ph.D. thesis, defended at Institut Fourier in Grenoble, France in 2012. HAL.

  • A natural hermitian metric associated with local universal families of compact Kähler manifolds with zero first Chern class, Comptes Rendus Mathematique Volume 350, 2012, 63—66. DOI, arXiv.

  • Géométrie algébrique, géométrie analytique, M.Sc. thesis, defended at Institut Fourier in Grenoble, France in 2009. Link.

Personal

  • Lyttle Lytton semifinalist, 2017. Link.

  • Bókahillan, Stína 9, November 2014. Link.

  • Miscellaneous answers to reader questions about science, The Icelandic Science Web, 2006—2007. Link.

  • Popular music reviews, Rjóminn, 2005—2006.