Distinguished Engineer in the Developer Division at Microsoft, since November 2020.
From October 2019 till October 2020 I was retired.
From January 2013 through October 2019, I worked for Dropbox, where most recently I worked on mypy and on migrating over 5 million lines of server-side code from Python 2 to Python 3.
From December 2005 till December 2012, I worked for Google. My first project was an internal code review tool, Mondrian. After that I worked on the App Engine project, where I worked on the Admin Console, the Appstats library, the NDB library, and created an open-source code review tool, Rietveld.
From July 2003 till December 2005, I worked for Elemental Security, founded by Dan Farmer, as Senior Language Architect. The one thing I built here that had a lasting effect was a Python version of pgen, Python's parser generator, now immortalized in the Python standard library as lib2to3/pgen2/.
From October 2000 till July 2003, I worked for Zope Corporation as Director of PythonLabs.
From May through October 2000, I worked for BeOpen.com as Director of PythonLabs.
From April 1995 to February 1998, I was a guest researcher for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, working at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia. From March 1998 to May 2000 I was an employee of CNRI doing essentially the same work. The research was on mobile agents in distributed systems using interpreted languages. Most of the work involved Python, an interpreted, object-oriented programming language of my own invention. As an elaborate example, I wrote Grail, the first web browser written in Python. During this time I also wrote a funding proposal, Computer Programming for Everybody, that was funded by DARPA.
From mid October till mid December 1994 I was a guest researcher at NIST, working on Python. NIST sponsored my visit to the Usenix Symposium on Very High Level Languages in Santa Fe and organized the First Python Workshop.
From 1991 till 1995 I worked in the multimedia group at CWI, headed by Dick Bulterman. The group was working on authoring software for hypermedia presentations (both implementations and theoretical models) and on operating system and network support for multimedia and hypermedia, in particular synchronization of independent streams. They maintained a directory containing compressed Postscript of publications by the group. Most of the group's implementation work (even after my departure) was done in Python.
I was involved in several other projects at CWI:
From 1977 till 1982 I worked part-time for SARA.
I received a Master's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982, and joined CWI as a researcher in the same year. While studying, I worked for 5 years as a systems programmer at Amsterdam's academic computer center, SARA.
In November 2023 I received the very prestigious NEC C&C Prize
In November 2019 I was awarded the first Dijkstra Fellowship by CWI.
In October 2018 I was one of the five recipients of the first annual Oracle Groundbreaker Awards.
Since October 2018 I am an IEEE Senior member. (But they don't give senior discounts. :-)
In April 2018 I was entered into the Computer Museum's Hall of Fellows.
In June 2013 Python won the highly competitive Dutch COMMIT/ Award.
In July 2007 I was awarded the USENIX STUG Award.
In October 2006 I was elected ACM Distinguished Engineer.
In June 2003 I was finalist in the category "IT - Software (Individual)" of the World Technology Network awards.
In May 2003 I received the NLUUG Award 2003 for extraordinary services to the community of users of Unix and Open Systems.
In February 2002 I received the Free Software Foundation Award.
In May 1999 I received the Dr. Dobb's Journal 1999 Excellence in Programming Award, together with Donald Becker.
System for distributed task execution Robert Kahn, David Ely, Guido van Rossum, Theodore Strollo, Barry Warsaw (CNRI)
Structured content item synchronization (Dropbox)
Random identifier generation for offline database (Dropbox)