Welcome!

I'm Thomas, a kiwi studying electrical and computer engineering at Brown University. Many people know me online as metaterminal.

I do research around the following question: what happens at the intersection between software and hardware? Most software developers treat the computer as a Magic Box which can be reliably trusted to run their programs. But our software abuts reality, whether it be through climate impact, restrictions on computational power, or the interplay between the needs of data centers and their users.

I work as a research assistant at Brown's Center for Computation and Visualization, where I investigate the climate sustainability of high-performance computing clusters and the social impacts of software efficiency. I also do research in collaboration with the Scalable Energy-Efficient Computing Systems (SCALE) Laboratory around the quantization of vision transformer models.

In my spare time, I create puzzlehunts, write fiction, host a podcast, sing sea shanties, play guitar, help run an annual awards ceremony for puzzles, read and analyze literature, explore Brown's campus, and make other cool things. (Some of the cool things are on this website!)

Current work

Affiliations

Research

Puzzlehunt Teams

Undergraduate Clubs

Friends

A lot of people just link their friends' personal porfolios. I've biased this list towards people who actually have neat things on their websites (even if that makes it much shorter than it otherwise would be).

Alex K. • Alex Mazansky • Jonah Ostroff • Chloe Qiao • Jack Wrenn

Technical details

This site is run using the static site generator Zola, which is powered by Tera, and individual pages are written with Markdown. The site is deployed using Netlify. I don't use a default Zola theme or anything like that; any functionality on here, I have implemented myself.

(Should I have used React or some other kind of framework? Perhaps! But I enjoyed creating everything from scratch; implementing new features is fun! I also enjoy how lightweight the end result is.)

This site is entirely static. That means no ads and fast load times. I plan to keep my site like this for as long as I have it up.

I also host the websites for Brown Puzzle Club and the Bravo Puzzle Awards, which use an identical tech stack.

The font on this website is Hack.

Contact me

If you're interested in reaching out to me about my research, you should contact me at my institutional email thomas_gordon@brown.edu.

Otherwise, the best place to reach me is my personal email address, which is altmetaterminal@gmail.com.