Tim Goodwin

# Information

I am a 5th and final year 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

• Testing Custom Control Planes Without The Cluster
  Tim Goodwin, Lindsey Kuper, Andi Quinn.
  SOSP ‘26

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

• What goes wrong in serverless runtimes? A survey of bugs in Knative Serving
  Tim Goodwin, Andi 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)
  A compiler and runtime that simplifies the process of refactoring applications for scalable cloud deployment. Unlike a framework, Monolift’s compilation approach directly supports legacy code, enabling developers to rapidly transform existing applications to a variety of distributed architectures, enabling them to rapidly prototype deployment strategies while avoiding expensive and risky refactors.

• Kamera (2025)
  A deterministic simulation framework for testing Kubernetes control planes. Kamera runs real controller code in a simulated cluster environment, enabling fast and efficient exploration of the possible reconciliation paths across multiple loosely coupled controllers. 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)
  An experimental compiler for distributing Go applications onto Kubernetes. It extracts goroutines into Kubernetes Pods that communicate over HTTP. I presented Kompile as an early answer to the question “what if Kubernetes was a compiler target?” at KubeCon North America ‘24.

• running.build (Jul 2023)
  A web app to help plan and track the training blocks for the running events in your life. Integrates with Strava, provides an activity “birds-eye view” to track progress, and makes it easy to adjust plans around your weekly mileage targets when life gets in the way.

• 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)
  An events platform for social organizing and community memory.