I'm a Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where I work on the Java SE Platform, OpenJDK, and other random things.

In twelve years I've made many contributions to the platform: Character-stream readers and writers, reference objects, shutdown hooks, the NIO high-performance I/O APIs, library generification, and service loaders. I was the lead engineer for the 1.2 and 5.0 releases and the specification lead for Java SE 6. I currently lead the Jigsaw and JDK 7 Projects in the OpenJDK Community, where I also serve as chair of the Governance Board.

Like many in the Java community, I'm actually an old Lisp hacker in disguise. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked on garbage collection, compilation techniques, type systems, semantics, and the visualization and analysis of program performance, and where I found enlightenment in the true essence of the lambda nature.

Photo credit: Cultural Heritage Imaging