Greg Brockman's Home Page

Greg Brockman

I love to build. I sometimes also blog.

OpenAI, including Gym, OpenAI Five, our API, and training large-scale models such as Codex.
I'm the former CTO of Stripe, helping build it from 4 to 250 employees.
Rubysh, a Ruby subprocess library allowing sh-like syntax.
Stripe CTF, Stripe CTF 2.0, and Stripe CTF3 (Q&A).
Einhorn, the language-independent shared socket manager (see my Einhorn blog post for more info).
Domaincli: register domains from the command line.
Embedded Mongo: a Ruby library serving as a drop-in replacement for an actual MongoDB server.
Ruby Static Checker: statically detect name errors in Ruby.
Anygit: Find all parents of an arbitrary Git object.
I have a few patches in Git (my personal favorite was for an exploitable buffer overrun I found).
I somehow got roped into becoming a configatron maintainer.
Some of my Python patches worked their way through the bug tracker.
While at Harvard, I administered and built systems for the Harvard Computer Society.
I worked on and maintained a number of popular projects at MIT, including XVM, Linerva, and scripts.mit.edu.
I built infrastructure for Ksplice for about seven months.

The following are a collection of technical links that I've found interesting.

The Log. Everything you ever wanted to know about structured logs, and how to build distributed systems on top of them.
System operation. I think this is the best (and only, really) framework I've seen on how to think about running a complex system.
The Debian policy manual. It's most useful if you're already somewhat familiar with Debian packaging but want to learn Debian conventions.
Unicode and character sets. Character sets can be confusing. This article will magically make them not be so.
Overclocking SSL: SSL performance tuning. I found this pretty useful when initially setting up Stripe's SSL infrastructure.
Logging best practices: A short guide for how to think about logging. I wish more software followed this article's advice.
Git internals - Git objects: My favorite guide to the Git object model.
On mining: A good overview of the challenges Bitcoin mining currently faces.

Testimony at the first Senate hearing on AI.
Blog post on the Stripe perspective on Bitcoin.
The slides from my CoinSummit 2014 talk on what a Bitcoin for the mainstream might look like.
The video and slides from my BV.IO talk on scaling Stripe from 4 to 94 employees.
Quora post on how Stripe got its name.
The slides from my RubyConf AU 2014 keynote on what the Ruby community needs to change in order to remain relevant.
The slides from my Monkigras 2014 talk on building better software through mathematics.
The slides and video from my HNLondon talk in January 2014 on shipping at Stripe.
The video and slides from my talk "Building a Culture Where Software Projects Get Done" at QConSF 2013. (For detailed presenter's notes, grab the original Keynote presentation.)
Quora posts on Stripe's engineering challenges and interview process.
The transcript of an interview I did with Airbrake on how Stripe builds software.
Blog post on email transparency.
The video and summary of my talk on recruiting at Stripe from the First Round Capital CTO summit in 2012.
The slides for my talk "Running MongoDB for High Availability" at OSCON 2012. This is an updated version of my MongoSF 2012 talk.
The slides and video for my talk "High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit" at MongoSF 2012.
A piece in Gigaom on how we think about recruiting at Stripe.
The slides and video for my talk "There's a Monster in My Closet: Architecture of a MongoDB-powered Event Processing System" at MongoSV 2011.

Sunil Abraham, Greg Brockman, Stephanie Sapp, Anant Godbole.
Omnibus Sequences, Coupon Collection, and Missing Word Counts.
Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability (27 August 2011), pp. 1-16.
Greg Brockman, Bill Kay and Emma E. Snively.
On Universal Cycles of Labeled Graphs.
The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. Vol. 17 (2010), No. 1.
James Brantner, Greg Brockman, Bill Kay and Emma Snively.
Contributions to Seymour's second neighborhood conjecture.
Involve. Vol. 2 (2009), No. 4, 385-393.
My paper Asymptotic Behavior of Certain Ducci Sequences won 6th place in the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search. The first half of this paper was published in Fibonacci Quarterly; it can be found with the following citation:
Greg Brockman and Ryan J. Zerr.
Asymptotic Behavior of Certain Ducci Sequences.
Fibonacci Quarterly. Vol 45 (2007), No. 2, 155-163.
In high school, I was very involved in the Chemistry Olympiad (culminating with a Silver Medal in the International Chemistry Olympiad). I took a year off before college and spent a decent chunk of it attempting to write a high school chemistry textbook, affectionately dubbed A Chemical Progression. I became distracted by computers and forgot about the book, but one day I hope to finish it.
Apparently some chemistry research I did in high school was published.