Welcome!

My name is Alexis Goodfellow. This is my website. It doesn't look pretty, but it tells you what you need to know - just like a good design spec.

College Days

I graduated Tufts University with a degree in Computer Science in 2018, where I took particular interest in systems design, embedded systems, and cybersecurity. I participated in multiple capture-the-flag style competitions during college, and represented Tufts University as a team member twice in the embedded capture-the-flag cometition hosted by MITRE in both 2017 and 2018. The first project was to design a secure update protocol for firmware in a self-driving car, and the second was to design a secure chip-and-pin ATM banking system.

The culmination of my study of cybersecurity was a paper on the subject of quantum cryptographic key distribution (QKD) protocols. These protocols have inherent advantages over classical cryptographic algorithms when it comes to security, but all current implementations of them have physical flaws which can be exploited to undermine the theoretically perfect security they provide. Furthermore, there are significant logistical challenges regarding signal loss over fiber-obtic cables, which means that quantum information decays too quickly for it to be practical to use QKD across long distances.

Though these QKD algorithms and systems are not currently viable as security solutions for most due to both expense and impracticality, there are a few organizations, universities, and government institutions that are currently using on-premises short-range QKD networks. Much progress is being made on making this technology both more practical and more affordable, and the subject is being actively researched by physicists and computer scientists alike from all across the world.

Here is a link to the paper if you are curious about reading more about QKD

Here is a link to a follow-up paper I wrote proposing a distributed QKD implementation (still a draft)

There are two other projects from my college years which are worthy of note. The first of these projects is Composte, which currently is a proof-of-concept project aiming to be a networked and distributed sheet music editor. This project is incredibly mature for a college project, and uses the impressive music21 library maintained by the wonderful music department at MIT.

The second project worthy of note is a project called WinfreyEdit, which is a multi-user text editor. The project is no longer actively maintained and does not see any use, but it has an interesting latency-sensitive implementation. Using some analysis of per-packet round-trip times, WinfreyEdit was designed to dynamically adjust the update frequency of the shared document based on the lag time of the contributor with the worst internet connection.

Post-College Career

Soon after graduation, I worked at Arista Networks for half a year on their IPSec project. My job in particular was to design a testing suite to ensure that our implementation of the protocol was not just secure, but also could provide the 10 gigabit-per-second throughput we advertized. It was a personal goal of mine to be involved in writing code that would help keep the Internet secure, reliable, and efficient; I'm very fortunate to have been afforded that opportunity so early in my career.

I then joined Wayfair through their Labs program, and was placed on a permanent team after the Labs program was over. The team I was placed on was called "International Supply Chain - Ocean Operations", which basically meant that I wrote code to automate some of the tedious logistics associated with routing shipping containers across the ocean on cargo ships. Learning about the business aspects of supply chain was very interesting, but I soon concluded that it was not something I would be happy with in the longrun.

I then internally transfered to the Python Platform team, which is my current job. Our goal as a team is to develop scalable Python architecture for the entire company and serve as subject matter experts in Python programming. We set the coding practices and standards for Python at the organization, and we maintain several core libraries that are used throughout the company. We strive to make the process of taking a new project from proof-of-concept to production-ready service as painless and frictionless as possible. This kind of DevOps work is something I could see myself being happy with for a long time.

I also do talks at some of the local universities and colleges around Boston. I've lead a workshop about Vim on multiple occasions, such as at the 2019 Wellesley College hackathon (WHACK), at the 2019 Tufts University Women in Tech (WiT) conference, and internally at Wayfair for the entire Quality Assurance/Quality Engineering branch of the organization.

Additionally, I am a co-leader of Wayfair's trans-in-tech employee resource group, which provides policy information, guidance, and advocacy for transgender technologists at Wayfair.

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn!