OK, sappy thread #twithaca: @GrammaTech was founded in 1988 by Cornell professor Tim Teitelbaum and student Tom Reps. They developed an early version of what we now call an IDE and Tim has lamented a bit tongue-in-cheek that they didn't promote that more
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrammaTech
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrammaTech
They created the Cornell Program Synthesizer (ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/74…), the technology on which the company was built, on a computer called a Terak (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terak_851…). Here's Tim demonstrating it at our 25th anniversary celebration in 2013
Here's the Terak running a program that plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 😂
The aforementioned Wikipedia page has history leading up to when I joined, but couple things: CodeSurfer's a program understanding tool. It takes a program (source or binary) and lets you navigate and query for stuff about it in an abstract way. You can build tools on top of it.
One of those tools is a static analysis bug-finder called CodeSonar. Static analysis means we don't run the program to learn about it. Developers use CodeSonar to identify issues with their code before more nefarious folks do.
CodeSONAR uses the information that CodeSURFER gleans from a program to look for, say, instances where a program reads or writes data where it shouldn't. Hackers can use those kinds of vulnerabilities to control or exfiltrate data from a program.
Anyway, some know I moved to Ithaca a decade ago because my wife got a job at TC3. There are not a lot of software jobs in the area. I interviewed at GrammaTech and a place in Syracuse. I thought I bombed the GT interview and aced the other. I prepared myself for an hour commute
Not only did I get the Ithaca job, but the timing was pretty perfect: I moved to Ithaca and started work on September 1, 2009, just a month after my wife moved here for her job. One of the smoothest "two body problem" situations I've heard of for this area! Still feel so lucky.
When I started, GrammaTech had maybe 25 people. We were at 315-317 N Aurora St, a big green house. My desk was in the carriage house in the back. My first assignment was to fix something called KATE (grammatech.com/autonomic-comp…) so it could monitor every instruction of a Linux boot 
By 2011 we had gotten too big for that house, so we moved to an old paper warehouse at 531 Esty Street. My colleague Mimi (now retired) wrote this incredible history of the building that houses GrammaTech and many of the things around it: blogs.grammatech.com/the-office
Sometime around then I was working on GrammaTech's in-house concolic execution tool. It uses dynamic (vs static mentioned earlier) analysis to study a program: run the program, build a mathematical model of it, use the model to generate inputs that explore different parts of it
This is useful for making sure you've covered everything a program can do in order to find crashes or other unexpected behavior. You can also use it offensively to intentionally crash programs. Here are some posts I wrote about it:
blogs.grammatech.com/hybrid-concoli…
blogs.grammatech.com/hybrid-concoli…
blogs.grammatech.com/hybrid-concoli…
blogs.grammatech.com/hybrid-concoli…
The highlight of my career, though, was working on Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC). DARPA has had "Grand Challenges" for self-driving cars, robots, launching into space. CGC was about building autonomous systems to play a hacking game called Capture the Flag: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame_(…
Out of over 100 teams that initially joined the challenge, a team comprised of people from GrammaTech and The University of Virginia were one of 28 teams to make the qualification event, a contest that whittled the field down to 7 competitors en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Cybe…
The final showdown amongst those teams was held at DEFCON in Las Vegas. The event was unlike any research project I've been on, with crazy visuals and play-by-play announcers that narrated the competition
Ultimately we got 2nd place and took home $1 million in prize money (half of course went to the company whose technology our success was built upon, and the other half went to the UVa crew). The @ithacavoice did a great write-up of it: ithacavoice.com/2016/08/ithaca…
And while CGC was the highlight, I still work on interesting novel technology to defend software against attack. I work on new things all the time, sometimes more than one project at a time.
The culture is laid back. The people are intelligent beyond belief (the company is 1/3rd or so Ph.Ds) and I learn from them every day. It's super flexible so I can leave for the many (MANY) city and TCAT meetings I have to attend throughout a day and make up the time later.
Even as we neared 100 people Tim more or less knew what everyone worked on. He and Tom created and lead a company that achieved technical excellence while maintaining a family-like atmosphere. It is EASILY the best job I've ever had.
We're under new ownership now, and yeah I'm a little anxious about it (), but no matter what happens I'm very thankful to have had these 10 years here. It's given me the freedom to serve my community while providing work that challenges me in the best way.
Oh, and we're always hiring! grammatech.com/careers
