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.