[Photo]
2013 – 2011 – 2006 – 2002ish by Paula M.


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Eddie Kohler
kohler@seas.harvard.edu

I’m currently an awesome Microsoft Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. Previously, I worked for Meraki (now Cisco Meraki), was an ass. professor at UCLA, was Chief Scientist at Mazu Networks, and held a research appointment at ICIR. My research interests include systems, networks, programming languages, and software engineering.

I am a gay man and use they/them pronouns (he/him are also fine; an article about pronoun choice).

I am not affiliated with the bogus website eddiekohler.com.

Publications. Github.

Fall 2024 office hours: Monday 4–5pm and Tuesday 10–11am, SEC 4.412, or whenever I’m in my office and available
Classes: 

CS 2610 Research Topics in Operating Systems (Spring 2025)
Spring 2021, Fall 2011

CS 161 Operating Systems (Spring 2024)
Spring 2024, Spring 2019, Spring 2018

CS 61 Systems Programming and Machine Organization
Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2012

CS 260r Topics and Close Readings in Computer Systems
Spring 2022: Large-Scale Distributed and Parallel Computations
Spring 2019: Serverless Computing
Spring 2017: Verified Systems
Spring 2015: Reliable Systems
Spring 2014: Cloud Big Data Systems

CS 207 Systems Development for Computational Science
Spring 2012 lecture notes
UCLA classes: 

CS 111 Operating Systems Principles (Winter 2011) (Evaluation)
Fall 2007 (Evaluation), Spring 2007 (Evaluation), Fall 2006 (Evaluation), Spring 2006 (Evaluation), Fall 2005 (Evaluation), Spring 2005 (Evaluation)

CS 235 Advanced Operating Systems (Fall 2010) (Evaluation)
Winter 2008 (Evaluation), Fall 2006 (Evaluation), Fall 2005 (Evaluation), Fall 2004 [CS 239-1] (Evaluation)

CS 239-1 Distributed Systems Infrastructure (Winter 2008) (Evaluation)
CS 239-2 Readable Kernel Systems (Winter 2005) (Evaluation)
CS 239-3 Readable Software Systems (Spring 2004) (Evaluation)

Projects: Anvil, Asbestos, Click, DCCP (Service Code Calculator), Featherstitch, Kudos, Masstree, SNACK, Suelo, Sympathy, Tamer, Tenet, XORP. Old: Eel, Prolac.

Software: Gifsicle, HotCRP, Ipsumdump, John Kimble, LCDF Typetools, Masstree, T1utils, Xbraitenberg, Xmahjongg, Portable Xshostakovich++ 98!!, Xwrits, Xzewd.

Contact information

      

Harvard Science & Engineering Complex (SEC) Room 4.412
150 Western Ave
Boston, MA 02134
+1 617 496-2630

          

Email: kohler@seas.harvard.edu

I regret that I have bad email habits. Nevertheless, I prefer email to the phone for first conversations, thanks.

Click questions will generally be forwarded to the Click mailing list (and then answered). If you don’t want a question made publicly available, say so explicitly in your message.
 

Notes

“I have learned—but again and again I forget—that abstraction is a bad thing, innumerable and infinitesimal and tiresome; worse than any amount of petty fact. … It is like a useless, fruitless vegetation, spreading and twining and fading and corrupting; even the ego disappears under it …”
Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk
“One’s reasoning is a strange thing; is really not reason, is a mingling of resistances, unperceptiveness, un-coordination and helplessness.”
Marianne Moore to Lloyd Frankenberg, December 26, 1943 (Selected Letters)
“… I romantically swore a loyal oath in the other garden that until my own death I would eschew ambition for worldly success and avoid the wielders of influence and power, choosing my friends among the innocently uncompetitive. It is not a vow that I have always been able to keep.”
Francis Wyndham, The Other Garden
“At the beginning of a new notebook I copy a quote from Simone Weil, which captures me completely: ‘Don’t insist on understanding new things, but try with your whole self, with patience, effort and method, to comprehend obvious truths.’ ¶ This quote conducts a polemic with the ceaseless, barbaric pursuit of novelty and disdain for obvious, primary truths. ¶ And so all my notes, all these snail’s traces, are the realization of Simone’s one thought. I won’t and can’t discover anything, I want only with my whole self to reach the heart of obvious truths.”
Anna Kamienska, Industrious Amazement: A Notebook (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
“Our mass culture—and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well—is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility, and speculation. We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information. … [O]ur scholars—or, more accurately, our research administrators—erect pyramids of data to cover the corpse of a stillborn idea….”
Dwight Macdonald, “The Triumph of the Fact,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
“[Psychologist Albert] Bregman … gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received. Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head. ‘Is this a hard choice for you?’ he demanded. Yes! I cried. ‘Oh,’ he said, springing back up cheerfully. ‘In that case, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.’”
Adam Gopnik, “Music to your Ears”
→ Longer quotes

Graduate students

  • William Qian
  • Yihe Huang

      

Alumni/ae

Projects and software

Dormant

Non Academic