I’m the Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle.

Prior to working at Oracle I did much the same thing at Sun Microsystems, a great company which was too lucky for its own good during the boom years and subsequently driven into the ground by a false prophet who was long on vision and short on execution.

Since 1996 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, service loaders, and modules. I was the lead engineer for the 1.2 and 5.0 releases, the specification lead for Java SE 6, and both the project and specification lead for JDK 7 (Java SE 7), JDK 8 (Java SE 8), and JDK 9 (Java SE 9). I currently lead the JDK Project in the OpenJDK Community, where I also serve on the Governing 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.

You can follow me on Mastodon, and read my blog. I was active on Twitter from 2008 until early 2023, when they ungraciously killed all the third-party client applications.

If you need to reach me by e-mail, construct my address using the usual first.last@oracle.com pattern.

The fingerprint of my GPG/PGP key is 5F15 4E58 2F28 A969 475A 684D 5A1F F126 9108 F91A; you can find the key itself here, or on Keybase.