I’m Darby Huye. I live in Boston, where I research observability in the cloud.

I'm a third year Ph.D. Candidate in the D.O.C.C. Lab at Tufts University studying under the guidance of Professor Raja Sambasivan. My research interests involve leveraging distributed tracing for debugging performance problems in cloud-based systems.

The first portion of my Ph.D. research was centered on understanding the buzzword microservices. I (along with my colleagues) conducted a user-study interviewing folks in industry and academia about their experiences with microservice-based applications. We found that the assumptions around this buzzword and the open-source academic testbed applications are far too limited to enable robust research in this space. This lead me to an internship at Meta, where I had the opportunity to analyze aspects of their microservice applications. My findings were published at ATC '23 and a portion of the data was released on github.

I am working on chapter two of my Ph.D. which is investigating: 'how can we capture meaningful observability data in our systems?' Prior research in this space assumes perfect observability (or ignores the possibility of imperfect data), which is far from the reality at many large organizations. I plan to investigate how we can make decisions regarding the performance of a distributed system given imperfect tracing data.

Beyond research, I try to spend most of my time outdoors hiking or kayaking. I also climb and dabble in sewing (peep some of my sewing projects here).