Sam Estep

Hi! 👋 I'm Sam (he/him). I'm a software engineer at Main Street Autonomy, on leave from the Software Engineering PhD program in S3D at CMU, advised by Joshua Sunshine. My research specialization is programming language design and implementation.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my lovely partner Lee and my amazing friends in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. I'm also a somewhat active contributor to Nixpkgs. Waiting for Sea of Sorrow to come out.

Publications

A Mixed Methods Study on the Implications of Unsafe Rust for Interoperation, Encapsulation, and Tooling

Ian McCormack, Tomás Dougan, Sam Estep, Hanan Hibshi, Jonathan Aldrich, and Joshua Sunshine. TOSEM.

TestLoop: A Process Model Describing Human-in-the-Loop Software Test Suite Generation

Matthew C. Davis, Sangheon Choi, Amy Wei, Sam Estep, Brad A. Myers, and Joshua Sunshine. TOSEM.

Codifying Visual Representations

Wode Ni, Sam Estep, Hwei-Shin Harriman, Jiří Minarčík, and Joshua Sunshine. DIAGRAMS 2024.

Rose: Composable Autodiff for the Interactive Web

Sam Estep, Wode Ni, Raven Rothkopf, and Joshua Sunshine. ECOOP 2024.

Minkowski Penalties: Robust Differentiable Constraint Enforcement for Vector Graphics

Jiří Minarčík, Sam Estep, Wode Ni, and Keenan Crane. SIGGRAPH 2024.

Edgeworth: Efficient and Scalable Authoring of Visual Thinking Activities

Wode Ni, Sam Estep, Hwei-Shin Harriman, Ken Koedinger, and Joshua Sunshine. L@S 2024.

NaNofuzz: A Usable Tool for Automatic Test Generation

Matthew C. Davis, Sangheon Choi, Sam Estep, Brad A. Myers, and Joshua Sunshine. ESEC/FSE 2023.

Gradual Program Analysis for Null Pointers

Sam Estep, Jenna DiVincenzo, Jonathan Aldrich, Éric Tanter, Johannes Bader, and Joshua Sunshine. ECOOP 2021.

Blog

2026-03-09	Newcomb's paradox needs a demon
2025-09-05	Parameters and binding forms should be mutually recursive
2025-06-23	How much slower is random access, really?
2025-03-27	First impressions with Typst
2024-10-20	How can computers roll dice?
2021-02-20	Parallelizing nvcc