Baltasar Dinis
PHD Student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBaltasar Dinis is a PhD student at MIT CSAIL’s PDOS group with nine years of experience bridging academic research and production engineering in distributed systems and cybersecurity. Trained at Instituto Superior Técnico and now pursuing a PhD at MIT, he blends deep systems research with hands-on work improving datacenter reliability and network configuration tooling during a stint at Meta. His contributions to jj, a Git-compatible VCS, show a focus on practical back-end engineering—adding Git fetch, refspec support, multi-remote/branch handling, and CI automation to real-world developer tooling. Prior research roles at INESC‑ID and internships at MemSQL and Max Planck reflect a pattern of moving ideas from prototypes to robust implementation. Based in Cambridge, MA, he is as comfortable writing core VCS plumbing as designing experiments for distributed systems research. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic researcher-engineer who finds elegant, testable solutions to complex coordination and security problems.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science at Instituto Superior Técnico
English, Portuguese, French, Spanish
Github Skills (6)
git10
dvcs10
rust10
cli9
automations8
automation8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
jj-vcs/jj
Jan 2025 - Dec 2025
A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:306 reviews, 76 PRs, 160 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Baltasar primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `jj` version control system, focusing on enhancements to the Git integration. They implemented features related to Git fetching, including testing and supporting multiple remotes and branches. Moreover, the user added support for refspecs and refactored and relocated git fetch code. The user also worked on improving the overall Git-based workflow of `jj`, adding automation for builds, tests, and deployments.
bsdinis/jiftools
Jul 2024 - Dec 2025
Contributions:4 PRs, 77 pushes, 13 branches in 1 year 5 months
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