[Photo]
Larger photo by Queen Paula

  

Eddie Kohler
kohler@seas.harvard.edu

I’m currently an ass. professor of computer science at Harvard and consult for Meraki. Previously, I was an ass. professor at UCLA, Chief Scientist at Mazu Networks, and held a research appointment at ICIR. My research interests include systems, networks, programming languages, and software engineering.

Publications. Github.

Classes:  CS 61 Systems Programming and Machine Organization (Fall 2012)
CS 207 Systems Development for Computational Science (Spring 2012)
CS 261 Research Topics in Operating Systems (Fall 2011)
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

      

Maxwell Dworkin Room 327
33 Oxford St
Cambridge, MA 02138-2933
+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
→ Longer quotes

Graduate students

  • Bryan Kate
  • Michael Kester

      

Alumni/ae

Projects and software

Dormant

Non Academic