Tim Goodwin

# Information

I am a 4th year PhD student in the LSD lab at UC Santa Cruz where I am generously supported by the NSF CSGrad4US fellowship. I’m broadly interested in distributed systems and the abstractions we use to build them. Lately, I’ve been focusing on cloud-native programming models and the challenges they present to developers.

I lead a small engineering team at Impossible Effort, where we are currently building a new social tool for organizing and archiving community events. I also record and produce music as Nuns Honey - have a listen!

Contact

timg.goodwin@gmail.com

Github * Linkedin * Strava

# Publications

• Monolift: Automating Distribution With The Tools You Have At Home
  Tim Goodwin, Esteban Ramos, Andrew Quinn, Lindsey Kuper.
  PLOS ‘25

• What goes wrong in serverless runtimes? A survey of bugs in Knative Serving
  Tim Goodwin, Andrew Quinn, Lindsey Kuper.
  SESAME ‘23

• Performance Analysis of WebRTC-based Video Conferencing
  Bart Jansen, Tim Goodwin, Varun Gupta, Fernando Kuipers, Gil Zussman.
  IFIP Performance ‘17

# Talks

• I’ve Got 99 Problems and They’re All Controllers
  KubeCon North America ‘25

• What if Kubernetes was a compiler target?
  Tim Goodwin, David Morrison.
  KubeCon North America ‘24

# Projects

• Monolift (2025)
  Monolift is a new technique for developing scalable cloud applications that prioritizes incremental adoption and support for legacy code. Instead of exposing a new framework for developers to adopt, Monolift refactors existing applications for scalability via a compiler pass, and synthesizes runtime instrumentation to dynamically manage the compiled application’s distribution in response to live performance metrics.

• Kamera (2025)
  Kamera is a deterministic simulation testing framework for Kubernetes control planes. Targeting platform engineering use cases, Kamera quickly diagnoses issues in custom control planes by tracing causality across controller reconciliations and the environmental events that trigger them.
  Covered by The New Stack.

• terrazas (Jan 2025)
  A weekend experiment with graph coloring and backtracking algorithms, inspired by the work of Mexican artist Eduardo Terrazas.

• kompile (Fall 2024)
  A Go compiler targeting Kubernetes applications. It can automatically transform a monolithic app into a microservice architecture by extracting subroutines into microservices that are called over HTTP. Presented at KubeCon North America ‘24.

• obsidian-jot (Dec 2023)
  A macOS menu-bar app that allows you to append a quick thought to an Obsidian daily note via a global hotkey. Helps you avoid even the slightest context switch so you can persist a thought into your note system almost as quickly as you can think it. I needed this so I made it!

• crd-tweet (Mar 2023)
  A fully peer-to-peer twitter prototype built with CRDTs that seeks to explore what an entirely decentralized, local-first social media platform may look like.

• Happenings (2019 - present)
  A social platform for organizing and archiving community events.