Tim Chevalier

About me

Résumé

Academic

Software

Semi-useful information

Quotations

Writing

Fun

To contact me, email mylastname at alum dot wellesley dot edu.

About me

Professional

"He said to think long-term investment
And that all the others had forgiven themselves
Because the net reward had justified the colossal mess they made of their lives."
-- They Might Be Giants

I'm a graduate student and research assistant in the High-Assurance Systems Programming group at Portland State University, where I work with Andrew Tolmach.

In some of my past lives, I was a grad student at Berkeley and an undergrad at Wellesley.

Personal

"Oregon is bad
Stop it if you can."
--John Linnell, "Oregon"

I live in the Mount Tabor neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. I enjoy cycling, playing board games, writing, and reading. If you think you used to know me under a different first name, you're probably right.

Want to know more about me? Be careful what you ask for.

Résumé

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

I'm not currently looking for work, but 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

Writing

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.)

Software

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.

Semi-useful information

The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist

As a male programmer who has spent a lot of his life getting perceived as a female programmer, I am happy to host the Male Programmer Privilege Checklist (originally written by Kake, extended by me and others.)

Ubuntu on the HP Pavilion dv6000

Tips for getting Ubuntu to run on an HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop.

My quotations file

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

Quotations that speak to me.

Things that I wrote

"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.

Things are are fun

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."--Bertrand Russell

Things to do in Portland (mostly).

Groups I am or have been involved with

In reverse chronological order:

Places I've worked

FNMOC, Institute for Legal Research at UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, GrammaTech, Laszlo Systems, Good Vibrations, Averant, Information Services at Wellesley College.

Places I've lived

North Tabor, Sunnyside, and Goose Hollow in Portland, Oregon; Salinas, California; Oakland, California (West Oakland); Cambridge, UK; Ithaca, New York; Berkeley, California (Southside); Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard Square); Wellesley, Massachusetts; Woods Hole, Massachusetts; Boston, Massachusetts (West End).

Everything else

Things people have borrowed from me (you don't care)

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

Last modified: January 4, 2010