Google I/O

Speakers

Learn first hand from leaders in the field of web application development. Here are just a few of the speakers who will be at Google I/O.

Sang Ahn

Sang Ahn is a software developer at Google working on SketchUp things related to OS X and the API. His previous employers include @Last Software (which was acquired by Google Inc.). In his spare time he likes to play with Lisp and Ruby. He plans on renovating his kitchen into a lambda function.

Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer works in the Google Developer Programs group, which enables him to spend his life dabbling in developer facing technology. He works with teams such as Google Gears to make the Web a better place, and development on it more productive. He is also the co-founder of AJAXian.com, the leading source of the AJAX community. He enjoys writing, and speaking at events around the world, and was co-author of Pragmatic AJAX.

Ben Appleton

Ben is a software engineer in the Geo team. He currently leads Google's Maps API team, previously leading Mapplets and adding KML support to Google Maps. Before joining Google, Ben obtained a PhD in image analysis at the University of Queensland.

Michael Ashbridge

Michael is an engineer at Google and has worked on KML since he joined the company, designing the language, developing tools and applications, and helping it become an open standard.

Ken Ashcraft

Ken works as a software engineer on Google App Engine, a project he helped start. Prior to that, Ken worked on software infrastructure that helps make Google's products scalable and reliable. He enjoys working at Google because even small changes can affect millions of users.

Brandon Badger

Brandon is a Product Manager of the Geo team. He's worked to create the YouTube, Weather, and Book Search layers in Google Earth. He is currently involved in various initiatives to help Developers monetize their web applications.

Yoah Bar-David

Yoah Bar-David is the lead engineer for the Visualization API product at Google. He also leads development of regional products in the Tel-Aviv office. Yoah joined Google from iRows, which he founded after holding senior engineering positions in a long list of start-ups.

Nir Bar-Lev

Nir Bar-Lev is a Product Manager at Google. Nir is part of the product team where he leads several products, including the Google Visualization API. Prior to that, while at Google Nir worked on various mobile products, such as Mobile Search, Mobile News, Goog-411 and others. Prior to joining Google Nir held senior positions in several start-ups in the search and communication space. Nir holds a BSC from the Technion, LLB from Haifa University and an MBA from Wharton.

Ryan Barrett

Ryan Barrett is the lead engineer on the Google App Engine datastore. He's a systems engineer at heart who happened to get sidetracked into making webapps scale. Before App Engine, Ryan worked on transaction processing, database sharding, distributed and grid computing, and network protocols. Outside of work, Ryan contributes to open source projects, wins Nobel Prizes, cures cancer, and recently achieved nirvana. That was on Tuesday.

Chris Bissell

Chris is Chief Software Architect at MySpace. His job is to come up with convoluted method signatures so other developers can have the satisfaction of renaming them.

Josh Bloch

Josh Bloch is the Chief Java Architect at Google. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and a Senior Systems Designer at Transarc. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the Java Collections Framework. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Jackie Bodine

Jackie is the product manager for the Google Data APIs. Prior to Google, she worked as a program manager and enterprise consultant at Microsoft. Jackie graduated from Cornell University with a double major in Computer Science and Economics. Outside of work, Jackie loves debate and was the founder of the NYC Debate Meetup.

Aaron Boodman

Aaron is a tech lead on Google Gears and has been an active member of the web development community for many years. At Google, he has worked on web applications such as Blogger and Gmail. On the side, he wrangles the Greasemonkey project.

Dan Bornstein

Dan Bornstein is the tech lead at Google for Android's virtual machine and core library efforts, where he developed the specification for the Dalvik virtual machine. He continues to contribute to its implementation along with several coworkers. He studied computational linguistics as an undergrad, earning a B.S. in Cognitive Science from Brown University. Dan lives in San Francisco, where he particularly enjoys participating in the experimental electronic music scene.

Ryan Boyd

Ryan Boyd is on the Google Data APIs team, focusing on helping developers interface with Google APIs. He's been most active in supporting the Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, and YouTube APIs. Ryan also maintains the open source PHP client library which is distributed as the Zend_Gdata component of the Zend Framework. Previously he worked at his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology, developing web applications and architecting web hosting environments.

Patrick Brady

Patrick is a Technology Program Manager in Google's Partner Solutions group, working with Open Handset Alliance members to develop Android-based mobile devices. Prior to joining the Android team, he worked with Google's partners to distribute mobile applications on other platforms.

Nat Brown

Nat is the CTO of iLike.com, a service that lets you discover music and concerts through your friends, wherever and whenever you and your friends connect and listen to music. Prior to helping start iLike.com Nat was a software engineer and architect at Microsoft through the 90's where he worked on desktop applications, COM/OLE, kicked off ActiveX, CLR/.NET, and helped start the original xBox project. Nat also worked in consulting and management at small startups during the popped bubble while hacking on linux, consumer electronics, and embedded processors. Nat lives in Seattle with his wife, 2 kids, and 2 cats.

Chris Chabot

Chris Chabot works for the biggest domain registrant, website and blog hosting service in The Netherlands, who got the idea that the web is better when it's social. As such he became the author of the PHP port of the Shindig project. Before the recent trip to the (open) social world Chris has always worked with his passion, connected computers and people, ranging from dialup system software for international transport companies in the early 90's to more recently, some of the leading Web 2.0 sites in The Netherlands.

Patrick Chanezon

Patrick Chanezon is an API Evangelist at Google. These days his main interests are the OpenSocial API and social software, Google APIs, REST and AJAX, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and Python. Patrick is French, so he takes long vacations in the summer and likes to drink red wine with baguette and stinky cheese while wearing a beret.

Jason Chen

Jason is currently a developer advocate at Google where he works on ensuring that developers for the Android platform are successful. He previously led the developer support team for Google Checkout. Prior to joining Google, Jason worked at IBM and Urchin Software.

Ben Collins-Sussman

Ben is a member of Google's Open Source Program Office, working on projects to promote the spread of open source software both inside and outside the company. He is a technical lead for Google Code's open source project hosting service, available at http://code.google.com. He helped port Subversion to Google's Bigtable technology, which now runs across numerous machines and serves over 80,000 open source repositories. Prior to Google, Ben spent five years with Collabnet as one of the original designers and founders of the Subversion project. He is still active in the Subversion community and is also a co-author of the O'Reilly book "Version Control with Subversion". He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and enjoys speaking with Brian Fitzpatrick at various conferences on topics both serious and irreverent.

Derek Collison

Derek Collison is a technical director of engineering at Google currently working on the AJAX Apis. He joined Google in 2004. Prior to Google, Derek was Chief Architect and SVP at TIBCO Software.

Jason Cooper

Jason Cooper works within Google Developer Programs supporting the Google Mashup Editor and, more recently, OpenSocial. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2007 and currently resides in Silicon Valley.

Ray Cromwell

Ray Cromwell is CTO and co-founder of Timepedia.org where he dreams of flying over vast historical data landscapes in a web-based time machine. These days, he works on visualization software using Google Web Toolkit. Prior to Timepedia, he led Oracle's efforts to build mobile XForms implementations and draft IETF standards for push email.

David Day

Dave Day is a software engineer who works on Mapplets and the Google Maps API out of the Sydney office. Dave graduated from the University of Sydney with BSc/BE (Hons), where he focused on Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has previously worked in the power industry writing simulation and database software.

Jeff Dean

Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented a number of search quality improvements, designed and built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure such as MapReduce and BigTable, and worked on a variety of internal and external developer tools.

Dustin Diaz

Dustin is a User Interface Engineer for Google in the User Experience department in Mountain View, California. He enjoys writing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, as well as making interactive and usable interfaces to inspire passionate users. Dustin is also the author of Pro JavaScript Design Patterns, the unofficial candid photographer of Google, and enjoys the coffee they make at Slice cafe.

Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona is the open source programs manager at Google, where his team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches.

Jeff Fisher

Jeff Fisher works with the Google Data APIs, specifically Picasa Web Albums and YouTube. Previously, he worked with the Google Docs APIs. Jeff believes in short bios.

Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian leads Google's Chicago engineering efforts and serves as engineering manager for Google Code and internal advisor for Google's open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple's largest corporate customers.

Brian has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF's VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles on subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing "Version Control with Subversion" as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell."

Pamela Fox

Pamela is the Developer Programs Engineer for the Google Maps API. She graduated from USC with her CS masters, where she helped grow the video games department and dabbled in the 3d animation and linguistics departments. She enjoys helping developers innovate with the Maps API and combine it with many of Google's other amazing APIs.

Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of AJAXian.com, an experienced Chief Technical Officer and Enterprise Java Architect, and is presently a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture and Swing/AJAX development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he's been professionally coding in Java. In 2005, Ben delivered over a hundred technical presentations at venues including JavaOne, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums.

David Glazer

David is Director of Engineering at Google and currently leads the OpenSocial team there. Prior to joining Google in 2006, he successfully started two companies: Verity in 1988 and Eloquent in 1995. Eloquent was later acquired by Open Text in 2005. David has decades of experience working in the technology sector and holds an SB in physics from MIT.

Vic Gundotra

Vic joined Google in 2007 as a Vice President of Engineering, responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs. He also oversees applications development. Previously, Vic spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he worked on a variety of products and operating systems, including Windows 3.0, NT, Windows XP, and Vista. He was recognized by MIT as a "Young Innovator under 35" for his work in sparking the Microsoft's change from Win32 to the .NET programming model.

Most recently, Vic was General Manager of Microsoft's developer outreach efforts worldwide, including evangelism and strategy for products like Windows Vista, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Microsoft CRM, and Windows Mobile.

Vic holds two patents in the area of distributed computing and identity-based access to cloud resources.

Bent Hagemark

Bent is a software engineer at Google, working on KML and tools for KML. Before joining Google, Bent worked at Opera Software and Silicon Graphics.

John Harding

John Harding is an engineering manager at YouTube, focused on bringing the YouTube experience to the rest of the web, as well as other devices like mobile phones and televisions. Before joining Google, John was a lead in the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, helping developers make great games for the Xbox and Xbox 360.

Jochen Hartmann

Jochen Hartmann works with the Google Data APIs, specifically DocList, Spreadsheets and YouTube. Previously, he worked as a freelance web-developer. He lives in Brooklyn and runs a small record label in his spare time.

Ron Hess

Ron Hess is a Principal Developer Evangelist for the Force.com platform. Ron joined salesforce.com in 2005 as a program manager for the AppExchange. Ron enjoys solving business problems and developing enterprise applications on the Force.com platform including several widely adopted applications that now appear on the AppExchange under the Salesforce Labs brand. Ron has an extensive background in software development, software management and program management with such companies as ATI Research, MyCFO.com, Lightspeed Semiconductor, General Magic and the Santa Cruz Operation.

Dan Holevoet

Dan Holevoet is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, focused on Gadgets and OpenSocial. In his free time he likes drinking wine, playing video games, and writing Ruby code, though his threading implementation makes it difficult to do all three simultaneously.

Bruce Johnson

Bruce Johnson is an engineering manager at Google, and the co-creator and tech lead of Google Web Toolkit (GWT). He joined Google in 2005, founding Google's engineering office in Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to Google, Bruce was the Director of Engineering at AppForge, an Atlanta startup specializing in cross-platform mobile development tools. Despite his recent Java focus, Bruce will always be a Bjarne Stroustrup devotee, and he keeps a copy of D&E in his night-stand.

Michael T. Jones

Michael Jones is Google's Chief Technology Advocate, charged with advancing the technology to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. He was formerly Chief Technologist of Google Maps, Earth, and Local Search, the teams responsible for providing location intelligence and information in global context to users worldwide. Before its acquisition by Google, Michael was CTO of Keyhole Corporation, the company that developed the technology used today in Google Earth. Previously he was CEO of Intrinsic Graphics and Director of Advanced Graphics at Silicon Graphics. A computer programmer since 4th grade, he is a prolific inventor, developer of notable scientific and computer graphics software, an engineering and business executive, and an avid traveler and photographer using a home-built 4 gigapixel camera made with parts from the U2/SR71

Rafe Kaplan

Originally a New Yorker, Rafe Kaplan graduated from the University of Manchester in 1996. Upon return to New York, he then worked in the financial industry for a bit before turning to multiple Start-ups. When that whole thing came to an end, Rafe moved to Washington DC and later to the San Francisco Bay area to work with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. This was a five year experience which included integrating data formats of various types in to a form useful for large scale statistical analysis, building flexible tools for human rights workers around the world, teaching multinational groups of technicians data management techniques, crash landing in a minefield and working on complex record linkage pipelines. Currently, Rafe is one of the core engineers working on Google AppEngine and the primary maintainer for the Datastore Model API.

Vivian Li

Vivian works in the Google Developer Programs group, and in her time at Google, has worked on a variety of Google APIs, such as the AdSense API, Google Web Toolkit, Google data APIs, Gadgets, and OpenSocial. When she finishes helping developers at work, she goes home to help her 3 year old browse the internet.

Lane LiaBraaten

Lane works with the Google developer community to help it build applications on top of Google APIs like OpenSocial and Google Data. His previous opensocial.Person.Field.JOBS include working with NASA and the Air Force on flight control software, and counting servers at AOL.

Paul Lindner

Paul Lindner is the Architect of hi5's OpenSocial-based Platform and an active contributor to the Apache Shindig project and the Opensocial/Gadgets specification. Over the last 20 years Paul has led efforts and created systems that make the Internet a better place. His past successes include building and promoting the Internet Gopher in the early nineties, creating Internet Systems for the ITU and Red Hat, co-authoring the 'mod_perl Developer's Cookbook' and scaling Six Apart's Typepad to support millions and millions of people.

Scott Lininger

Scott is a software engineer on the SketchUp team. In his previous life he was a 3rd party developer like yourself, trying to build commercial tools on top of Google APIs. Now that he's "on the inside," his mission is to promote the idea of SketchUp as a Platform, and make it easy to build world class 3D applications by leveraging all that Google has to offer.

Stephanie Liu

Stephanie Liu works with the Google Data APIs team, and has been supporting the YouTube APIs and Tools. Little known facts about her include being able to solve a rubik's cube in under 2 minutes and an uncanny ability to sing the preamble to the Constitution.

Mark Lucovsky

Mark Lucovsky is technical director of engineering at Google. Mark has held this position at Google since November 2004. Before joining Google, Mark was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft.

Damon Lundin

Damon is the Lead Software Engineer for Lombardi's SaaS process documentation tool, Blueprint. Damon has been a Java developer for ten years and has worked on numerous enterprise software projects at companies including pcOrder, Trilogy and Lands' End. He began his career at the height of the dot-com frenzy and has since learned that good and solid development practices and processes trump the cool and sexy when it comes to delivering a solid product (but of course both is better). He can be found most days in a dark room playing games and obsessing about a variety of socio-political topics.

Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks is a Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, bringing external developers and Google engineers together to make a better web. Over the last 20 years he's alternated between giant companies and founding startups - BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. The common thread has been working out how people, computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com

Mano Marks

Mano Marks is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, providing developers help with the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and other Geo APIs.

Alex Martelli

Alex Martelli is Uber Tech Lead - Production at Google. Alex is the author of "Python in a Nutshell", co-editor of the "Python Cookbook", a Member of the Python Software Foundation, and winner of the 2002 Activators' Choice Award and 2006 Frank Willison award for outstanding contributions to the Python community.

Alex Moffat

Alex Moffat is the Engineering Manager for Lombardi's SaaS process documentation tool, Blueprint. Alex has worked for both customers of enterprise software and makers of enterprise software starting back in the days of IBM 3270s, JCL and MVS. Along the way he's learnt that customers and vendors can have very different perceptions of the same product. He first started programming in Java back in the Beta 1.0 days but only started to get paid for it when he joined Lombardi in 1999. Since then he's worked on all sorts of different pieces of software but is really enjoying the challenges of Web 2.0 on IE 6.0. Without GWT it wouldn't be a quarter as much fun. And if you google "Truck Month", the first result will be Alex's blog post: "Truck Month, I hate Truck Month!".

Dan Morrill

Dan Morrill is a Developer Advocate for Google, where he helps developers build products with things like the Google Web Toolkit and Android. Before joining Google Developer Programs in 2006, he was a computer scientist at GE Research, where he gave himself headaches switching between JavaScript web development and integrated circuit design. Dan lives in San Francisco with his wife.

Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg is a developer advocate at Google for Google Gears. He is the creator of a number of libraries and frameworks for expanding the capabilities of web applications, and he is a core member of the Dojo project, a popular open source JavaScript framework. Brad also created Coworking, an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed.

Marzia Niccolai

Marzia works with developers of Google App Engine. Her dream is to be lead singer and keyboardist in Jeff Scudder's band.

Sourabh Niyogi

Sourabh Niyogi is a co-founder and Vice President of Engineering at Social Media Networks. He has created a number of products at Social Media Networks, including the first social network analytics application on Facebook, Appsoholic. Previously, Sourabh was a researcher at MIT in cognitive science, computational linguistics and machine vision, graduating with a master's degree in electrical engineering while pursuing his PhD in computational linguistics.

Maile Ohye

As a Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Maile coordinates Google Webmaster Central outreach efforts, such as the Webmaster Central Blog. Previously, Maile was a systems integration consultant for several pharmaceutical and technology companies, as well as for the Department of Defense. Maile earned a B.A. in Cognitive Science with a Computer Science emphasis from the University of California at Berkeley.

John Panzer

John Panzer is a Technical Lead/Manager at Google, currently working on Blogger and OpenSocial. He has been involved in standards efforts including AtomPub, Microformats, OpenID, and OAuth. Previously he helped AOL launch various web based community and social products including groups, polls, and blogs. His blog is at http://abstractioneer.org.

Jim Payne

Jim is the product manager for Maps API Premier, Maps/Local Syndication and various Maps API initiatives.

Dan Peterson

Dan Peterson is a product manager on Google's developer team, focusing on OpenSocial and Shindig. Previously, Dan led the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team during the transition to becoming an open source project and worked on Google's infrastructure team on web search and datacenter management. Dan earned a B.S. Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as minors in Technology & Management and philosophy.

Chris Prince

Chris Prince is a lead engineer on Google Gears. He previously worked on a number of Google's client products, including Toolbar and Desktop. Before Google, he helped develop the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms at Microsoft.

Jeff Ragusa

As a Partner Programs Manager, Jeff has spent the past two years collaborating with the growing network of ISVs and SIs in Google's enterprise technology partnership program. As Google's enterprise business and its business-focused product suite continue to expand, he's rallying a professional IT services community to expand their service offerings by leveraging the growing industry interest and adoption of Google Apps. Prior to joining Google, Jeff spent eight years in enterprise software development and consulting roles at Trilogy.

T.V. Raman

T. V. Raman (Google Research) focuses on making Google's Web solutions usable by the widest audience. For more information, see http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman and Google Web search

Peeyush Ranjan

Peeyush Ranjan is an Engineering Manager at Google, and works on multiple search related projects. Before Google, Peeyush worked at Microsoft, HP and couple of successful startups.

Owyn Richen

Owyn works at MySpace.com in their Seattle office, helping build the office and now running the development team for the mail system. He's a technology enthusiast, dog lover, and generally an all around nice guy.

Jeremiah Robison

Jeremiah is a founding member of the management team at Slide. As CTO, he leads technology strategy and development for the company's network of more than 170 million viewers worldwide. An early pioneer in mobile web technologies at Openwave, Jeremiah architected and built the first HTML browser for mobile phones. Under his leadership, the browser development team shipped more than a billion handsets worldwide and established Openwave Mobile Browser as the industry standard. Previously, Jeremiah worked at Apple on hand-writing recognition for the Newton. He holds a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he also competed on the NCAA championship water polo team.

Lior Ron

Lior is the Product Manager for geo search in Google, where he is trying to help the world around us get mapped using the power of the masses. Before joining Google, Lior co-founded a medical device and a search startup, and served in various managerial positions in the Israeli Intelligence, where he worked on GIS and search problems. Lior holds an MBA from Stanford and BSc and MS from the Technion - the Israeli institute for technology.

Arne Roomann-Kurrik

Arne works on OpenSocial and the Social Graph API for Google's Developer Programs group. He exhibits a perverse and often baffling appreciation for the JavaScript programming language.

Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).

Alex Russell

Alex Russell is Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit, serves as current President of the Dojo Foundation, and is Director of R&D for SitePen, a fast-growing web application development consultancy.

Mike Samuel

Mike Samuel is an engineer on Google's security team who wrote parts of Google Calendar.

Steven Saviano

Steven is a lead engineer on the Google Docs team. He recently worked on launching Google Docs Offline with Gears. Steven only likes his docs collaborative.

Chris Schalk

Chris Schalk is a Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs and technologies. He is currently engaging the international Web development community with the OpenSocial API. Chris has done extensive work with the adoption of OpenSocial in both the Indian and Japanese development communities. Chris also championed the creation of Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs), which now have several chapters internationally and hundreds of members. Before Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also co-authored the book "JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference" published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne.

Jeffry Scudder

Jeff works with the Google Data APIs and has focused on AdWords, Google Base, Google Documents and Blogger in his time at Google. Jeff also maintains the open source Python client library for Google Data APIs and contributes to the PHP library as well. He enjoys making beautiful music on all kinds of guitars and swimming in code. Jeff and his wonderful wife Vanessa live in the Silicon Valley area.

Lindsey Simon

Lindsey Simon is a Front-End Developer for Google's User Experience team. Simon hails from Austin, TX where he slaved at many a startup, taught computing at the Griffin School, and cut his teeth at the Austin Chronicle. He currently lives to eat and drink in San Francisco, and runs the foodie website dishola.com.

Jon Skidgel

John Skidgel is a user experience designer at Google where he works on developer and search products. Prior to Google, John was the lead designer for Macromedia Dreamweaver and has also worked at Adobe, Shutterfly, and Netscape Communications. He has published four books on DVD authoring, video production, and Flash Video.

Brett Slatkin

Brett Slatkin is a Software Engineer on the Google App Engine team. He formerly worked on Google's production server management and security systems. He lives in San Francisco.

Joseph Smarr

Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo's "Open Social Web" initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo's online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.

Steve Souders

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network.

Vadim Spivak

Vadim Spivak is a software engineer on the Google AJAX APIs team, specifically working on AJAX Loader, Search and Feed APIs. Previously, he worked on Gmail and Contacts.

Geoff Stearns

Geoff Stearns is a Flash Engineer at YouTube and the author of SWFObject, a Flash Plugin detection and embedding script that has become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash content. Before joining Google, Geoff worked on web projects for Adobe, MTV, New York 's MoMA, XM Radio, Comcast, Sony Pictures Classics and taught front end web development at The Cooper Union in New York.

Tom Stocky

Tom leads the team of product managers who work on Google's developer products. He was part of the teams that launched Google App Engine, Google AJAX Search API v1.0, and a handful of other APIs and tools. Prior to Google, Tom was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, which included work on computational linguistics and user interfaces for mobile phones. He holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, as well as a BS and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Bob Vawter

Bob Vawter is a professional computer geek with a background in Java development and large-scale system reliability. He is currently a Research Actualization Engineer with Google Inc. and a contributor to the Google Web Toolkit.

Charles Wiles

Charles is a Google Product Manager leading the mobile web effort in London and a key proponent of "the browser is the platform" on mobile. Charles has a PhD from Oxford University and an MBA from London Business School and was a founder of two successful start-ups before joining Google.

Steve Yegge

Steve Yegge is a Staff Software Engineer at Google. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and has nearly twenty years of experience in diverse industries that range from embedded operating systems for mobile devices at Geoworks, distributed e-commerce systems at Amazon.com, and massively-multiplayer game programming that garnered him a Grand Prize award at Comdex.