Phil Piwonka

Software Engineer

I love computers and writing software for them.

Work

Principal Software Development Engineer

– Present

Member of the AWS Lambda team

Senior Software Development Engineer

Member of the AWS Lambda team

Senior Software Development Engineer

Member of the Kindle team

Software Development Engineer

Member of the Kindle team

Software Development Engineer

Member of the SQL Server team

  • Focused on providing enterprise customers and developers with robust, scalable, and customizable synchronization solutions as a member of the SQL Server and SQL Azure Data Synchronization Team.

  • Primary developer on the Database Providers for the Microsoft Sync Framework, an API that enables developers to add peer-to-peer database synchronization capabilities to applications, services and devices.

  • Collaborated with external teams to deliver Database Provider integration in Visual Studio 2010 and 2008, enabling configuration of database caching and synchronization from within Visual Studio projects.

  • Designed and implemented new Merge Replication features for the SQL Server 2008 release.

  • Provided support for customers by working with the Customer Support Team to help diagnose urgent customer reported issues and drive them to resolution.

  • Attended multiple conferences such as TechEd and TechReady to interface with customers, collecting feedback and providing guidance.

  • Helped on-board new developers by teaching them current implementation and design details, as well as development processes and expectations.

Software Engineer

Worked on near-realtime processing systems

  • Designed, implemented, documented, and tested mission-critical numerical and clustering algorithms for processing data in a near-realtime high-performance UNIX parallel computing environment.

  • Utilized multithreading and shared memory programming models to scale algorithms in order to meet near- realtime processing requirements.

  • Wrote analysis tools in C++, Matlab, and Perl to help prototype and validate algorithms.

  • Interacted significantly with multiple customer organizations via delivery briefings and working groups.

  • Successfully lead several software development tasks.

Gawker

Creator and sole developer of “Gawker”, an open source application that allows users to create parallel time- lapse movies using video cameras connected over a network.

  • Featured on tuaw.com, lifehacker.com, digg.com, makezine.com, macupdate.com, and versiontracker.com.

Education

University of Colorado

Computer Science

Five Year Program for Bachelors and Masters Degrees

Publications

On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda

Published by USENIX Association

Awarded Best Paper at USENIX ATC'23! - We describe the storage and caching system we built, optimized for delivering container images on-demand, and our experiences designing, building, and operating it at scale. We focus on challenges around security, efficiency, latency, and cost, and how we addressed these challenges in a system that combines caching, deduplication, convergent encryption, erasure coding, and block-level demand loading.

Skills

Programming Languages

  • Java
  • C/C++
  • Microsoft .NET
  • Objective-C
  • Python
  • Go
  • Rust

Server Technologies

  • SQL
  • DynamoDB
  • SQS
  • Memcached
  • EC2

Client Platforms

  • Android
  • iOS
  • Mac
  • Qt

Interests

Pinball / Arcade games

Music