Tim Chevalier

Photo by Lena Tenenbaum

About me Résumé Academic Software Semi-useful information Quotations Writing Fun

Professional

"...Today's programmers still work in a world where changing tabs to spaces leaves them, basically, fucked."
-- Scott Rosenberg

I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a master's degree in computer science in 2004, and I graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in computer science (minoring in mathematics) in 2001. From 2007-2011 I was working on a Ph.D in computer science at Portland State University, until I was pushed out of the department for protesting sexual harassment.

Personal

"Please don't leave us here alone in this silicon hell."
--Allette Brooks

I'm currently living in San José, California. I enjoy cycling, playing board games, writing, and reading.

"Normal is a weapon of mass destruction. It's just as deadly, and just like those weapons, it'll never be found."
-- Thea Hillman

I'm a man with a transsexual body, and occasionally I write about that, usually more in an armchair-social-theorist way than a personal way. Here's what I wrote in 2007 to announce my coming-out. My views have evolved since then; I'd summarize them now by pointing out that cissexual people get to self-report their gender without having to "prove" it by exhibiting their anatomy or genetic makeup, and averring that the same right ought to be extended to everyone.

Résumé

"Progress doesn't come from early risers -- progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." -- Robert Heinlein

If you want to hire me, you could always read my résumé (PDF).

Academic

"But if you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study."-- Leslie Stephen

Publications

• "A Certified Framework for Compiling and Executing Garbage-Collected Languages", Andrew McCreight, Tim Chevalier, and Andrew Tolmach. ICFP '10

Writing

• "How To Fail Out Of Grad School Without Really Trying" (September 2010)
• My Research Proficiency Exam paper, "The Design and Implementation of a Safe and Lightweight Compiler for Haskell" (April 2009) (PDF, 521K)
• My master's thesis, "Implementing Type-Based Deforestation" (2004) (PDF, 375K)
• My undergraduate thesis, "Exploring the Type Inference Approach to Deforestation" (2001) (PDF, 378K)
• My application essays for the NSF Graduate Fellowship, for anyone who might be applying for that and want to see example essays.
• And for laughs, my first grad school statement of purpose (December 2000).

Posters

• "A Type System for Certified Garbage Collection of Haskell Programs" (with Andrew Tolmach; ICFP 2008 Poster Session) (inline PNG image, 4.1 MB)

Talks

• "The Design and Implementation of a Safe and Lightweight Haskell Compiler" -- slides from my Research Proficiency Exam talk, May 15, 2009. (PDF, 5.9M)
• "How to Be Both Lazy and Reasonable" -- slides from my final 15-minute talk for the Scholarship Skills class at PSU, March 17, 2008. (PDF, 1.6M)
• "Towards a GraphicsMagick Binding for Haskell" -- slides from my talk at the Portland Functional Programming Users' Group, February 11, 2008. (Cheap link to follow.)

Currently, I put most of my time into the Rust project.

Software I've written and am willing to show in public lives on my community.haskell.org home page. I've also contributed a little bit of code to GHC and even less code to darcs. All of this is rather old.

Semi-useful information

The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist

Ubuntu on the HP Pavilion dv6000

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit." -- W. Somerset Maugham

• Quotations that speak to me.

"I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves." -- John Updike

• I keep a sporadically updated public journal.
• A letter to the editor-cum-trans-rant (May 2008) from me that the Portland Mercury published.
• "What Price Normalcy?" (December 2007) -- an essay on the debate over whether to deny medical treatment to transsexual kids.
• "GNU's Not Eunuchs" (May 2005) -- the infamous RMS/ESR slash. Contains explicit language.
• Are you saved on the hard disk of life? (December 2001) -- a bus ride in Berkeley.
• My commencement speech (May 2001): I applied to be the student speaker at my college graduation, and this is the speech I submitted. Shockingly, I didn't get called in for an interview.
• "The Bald Squirrel" (April 2000) -- a short play about online discourse / homage to Ionesco.

Everything else

Things I want to read that don't have entries in All Consuming. (You probably also don't care.)