Peter Mattis is cofounder and chief technology officer of Cockroach Labs. His work spans the original GIMP image editor, infrastructure at Google and the design of CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to keep transactions correct as machines and regions fail.[1][2][3]
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Education
BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Completed 1997
[5]Links
Cockroach Labs
X Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer · Cockroach Labs
Career
Mattis and Spencer Kimball started GIMP as Berkeley students in 1995. He graduated with a BS in 1997 and later worked at Google, where his experience included Gmail and distributed storage. Cockroach Labs grew from work with Kimball and Ben Darnell on the limitations of available databases for a cloud-based application.[1][2][4][5]
Contributions
Help start a lasting open-source image editor
GIMP’s anniversary account credits Mattis and Kimball with beginning the project through Berkeley’s eXperimental Computing Facility. Their public release supplied an extensible image-manipulation program for Unix systems. Subsequent maintainers and contributors continued its development; the present project reflects that much larger community rather than the original pair alone.[2]
Make SQL transactions work across failure boundaries
Mattis coauthored the SIGMOD paper describing CockroachDB’s architecture with Rebecca Taft and the Cockroach Labs team. The system distributes and replicates data, coordinates transactions across those copies and supplies a SQL execution layer that scales with the cluster. The paper explains the transaction protocol and evaluates the tradeoffs involved in preserving consistency while serving geographically distributed applications.[3]
Ideas
In his Pragmatic Engineer interview, Mattis connects his renewed hands-on coding with AI tools to earlier work on data structures and storage systems. The conversation examines code review, reliability and the value of a domain expert who can judge a proposed implementation. Its examples link current tools to concrete engineering constraints, including latency and failures.[4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
Distributed databases with Peter Mattisnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.comAn interview connecting GIMP, Google storage, database design and AI-assisted engineering.
Begin with the interview’s GIMP and storage-system examples, then follow the database diagrams if you want more detail. It offers context before the SIGMOD paper; basic familiarity with databases helps in the later technical discussion.
Interview participant[4]Original source- CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Databasecockroachlabs.com
The team’s architecture and evaluation of a fault-tolerant distributed SQL database.
Coauthor[3]