Introductions

[Chris Newcombe <chris.n...@xxxxxxxxx>]

Welcome!

At the workshop on TLA+ in August, we decided to start this Google
Group to help strengthen and grow the community of TLA+ researchers and users. To help build the community, it would be great if new
members of the group could say a few words about themselves and their interest
in TLA+. I’ll start the ball rolling…

I’m a principal engineer at Amazon.com[1], in the Web
Services (databases) group.   I work on scalable fault-tolerant
distributed systems, for which correctness is critical.

TLA+ is the most valuable thing that I’ve learned in my
professional career.  It has changed how I work, by giving me an immensely
powerful tool to find subtle flaws in system designs.  It has changed how
I think, by giving me a framework for constructing new kinds of mental-models,
by revealing the precise relationship between correctness properties and system
designs, and by allowing me to move from ‘plausible prose’ to precise
statements much earlier in the software development process.  At Amazon
we’ve used TLA+ with great success on several projects[2], and I’m hoping to
increase that momentum.

I really enjoyed meeting everyone at the workshop, and I'm looking forward to meeting and learning from more people from the TLA+ world.

Chris

[1] Opinions expressed here are my own, not those of my employer.
[2] http://tla2012.loria.fr/contributed/newcombe-slides.pdf
[3] http://tla2012.loria.fr/program.html