Performance Engineering Unleashed: Powering Efficiency and Innovation

Thomas started his career in the field of computer security under the pseudonym "Halvar Flake", and spent ~20 years in that field. Starting from low-level reverse engineering, he moved toward tooling for malware and vulnerability analysis, started a company that did large-scale malware disassembly and correlation, sold the company to Google, spent 7 years at Google. There, he spent time integrating & scaling the technology and then returning to a research role where he encountered Rowhammer - the DRAM-reliability-issue that he helped turn into a security issue. He then switched fields to efficient computation and cloud economics, started a company that shipped the first multi-runtime, whole-system, whole-fleet in-production profiler, and then joined Elastic as part of getting acquired. His interests are the intersection of low-level machine understanding, the economical impact of efficient compute, and the ecological benefits of greater efficiency.