Julian Knodt

Cory Wong INCredible Coffee

Me and Cory Wong! I was standing weirdly because I was nervous taking a picture with him.

INCredible Coffee at Koenji in Tokyo, pictured is Shinbashi! The barista also sometimes DJs, I took some pictures of the DJs in Koenji, but since I didn’t ask permission I’m not gonna put them here. Live DJ sets Monday, Tuesday, Friday~

Research:

2024 Single Edge Collapse Quad-Dominant Mesh Reduction Simplify meshes while approximately preserving quad layouts (Also sharp feature and joint preservation)
2024 Texture Size Reduction Through Symmetric Overlap and Texture Carving Reduce the size of textures by compressing the UV using a modified version of seam-carving
2023 Joint UV Optimization & Texture Baking Differentiable rendering of different geometries for texture baking, with additional UV optimization

Games

I’m trying to get into making my own little games using Pico-8, which is a fantastic little game maker and way to run games. I’ve had moderate success, but will share what I make here!

Hey, I’m a programmer who is interested in a myriad number of things! I’m broadly interested in graphics (physically based rendering), compilers (Rust!), operating systems, and how people interact with social networks. I also dabble in machine learning, when it’s small enough to run on my 2010 GPU.

Outside of programming, I try to spend my time attempting to cook and bake, taking stupidly long walks around my neighborhood, and fencing. I’m still exploring many new activities 🙇, so if there’s anything neat to do feel free to reach out.

If you’re looking to collaborate on something, want to get coffee/tea, or are just generally interested in chatting, email me! I’m all over the place, so see above for where I am currently.

If you have any comments or questions on my writing, go to the github repo for this page, and file an issue, or make a pull request! I’ll get to ‘em eventually.

Work History

For those interested in hiring me, I’ve worked at a variety of places, on system software, and am mostly interested in backend/low-level software or research!

Where I've worked:
Internships:

Winter thru Summer ‘17: Brigade

  • Android Development (Kotlin) & GraphQL (Node) + Ruby on Rails

Summer ‘18: Paypal

  • GraphQL (Node)

Summer ‘19: Google

  • Testing liveliness of servers (Golang)

Summer ‘21: Tailscale

  • Add new port mapping protocols, Routing Server metrics (Golang)
  • See commits here
Research Places:

While the line between research and normal programming can be blurry, there are some things which are clearly research. While these are definitely “research”, usually I find just messing around with code can be close to research in its own way.

new 2025: POSTECH Visiting Researcher

Summer ‘20: Princeton Computational Imaging Lab

Arxiv!

Other Stuff

I also have been keeping a playlist for 7 years! This is the accumulation of some of the music I’ve been listening to since the end of high-school, and it at times reflects the emotions I felt while living my life. In that way, I consider it a summary of how I’ve felt over the past 7 years, so I hope that while listening to it, you can experience some of what I’ve felt.

Piet Mondrian

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Archive:

Writings: Projects:
  • Ink Renderer
  • Square Heap
    • An experiment with modifying the number of children for a heap. See readme for more info
  • Mireba
    • A photorealistic raytracer based on Mitsuba. WIP.
  • quick maths
    • A simple math library for use with mireba. Hopefully I can continue to upgrade to be more full-fledged for general purpose use but right now it’s designed for graphics.
  • Mat-FST
  • Small-SAT
    • A concurrent SAT solver based on MiniSAT. Exploring the idea of having multiple threads, but would’ve been a lot better if I had known Rust better at the time. Still learned a lot from it though.
  • artPanel
    • A fun CLI util to render images in terminal with color. If you’re in terminal all the time and find it bland you can run this in the background to lighten things up.