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 compiler-based tool that simplifies the process of refactoring applications for scalability. Monolift’s approach prioritizes incremental adoption and direct support for legacy code: it automatically refactors existing applications into scalable, cloud-native architectures, and synthesizes runtime instrumentation to dynamically optimize 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)
  An experimental compiler for distributing Go applications onto Kubernetes. It transforms goroutines into Kubernetes Pods that communicate over HTTP. This is an answer to the question “What if Kubernetes was a compiler target?” Presented a talk of the same name 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. More of a “birds-eye view” than Strava, and makes it easy to adjust your weekly plans around your 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.