John Ousterhout
John Ousterhout
Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science / Professor Emeritus · Stanford University
Bio
John Ousterhout is the Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is author of the book "A Philosophy of Software Design", co-creator of the Raft consensus protocol, and creator of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. Ousterhout received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of the ACM Software System Award.
Session (1)
John Ousterhout is the Stanford CS professor behind "A Philosophy of Software Design," the Tcl/Tk language, and (with Diego Ongaro) the Raft consensus algorithm, and his recent public work argues that software design discipline becomes more critical—not less—as AI coding tools generate complexity-laden code at scale. He pairs this design philosophy with active systems work on the Homa datacenter transport protocol and its Linux kernel implementation, offering rare practitioner-scholar perspective.
GitHub
@johnousterhout- johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code★ 1,700A discussion between John Ousterhout and Robert Martin about differences between their respective software design books.
- johnousterhout/homa-rfc★ 1An Internet-Draft describing the Homa transport protocol (based on the Linux kernel implementation).
- johnousterhout/cloudlab-profile★ 0Profile for running Homa experiments on CloudLab.
Public activity researched automatically · as of Jun 2026