eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
210 Techies in the Shadows – Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist, VMware
410 Techies in the Shadows – Parker Harris, co-founder, Salesforce.com
510 Techies in the Shadows – Ivan Krstic, director of security, One Laptop Per Child
610 Techies in the Shadows – Ted Tso, chief platform strategist, Linux Foundation
When you think Linux, you think Linus (as in Torvalds). But Ts’o is a top-level Linux kernel developer whose accomplishments are renowned in the open-source community: He was the first North American kernel developer, and, in August 1991, he set up the first FTP service between Finland and the United States.
His more recent work includes being the chair of the IP Security working group for the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standards body for the Internet; creator and organizer of the Annual Linux Kernel Summit; and technical lead for the MIT Kerberos 5 development team. He also won the 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, which is bestowed by the Free Software Foundation.
710 Techies in the Shadows – Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect, Plaxo
Smarr is Plaxo’s first employee and the technical lead for Plaxo’s developer platform. He is also lead engineer for Pulse, the company’s social aggregation initiative, designed to compete with Facebook and LinkedIn, among others.
Smarr also is one of the main authors of the Bill of Rights for the Open Social Web and Plaxo’s representative for the DataPortability WorkGroup, which is hashing out guidelines to allow data to be safely shared across applications and social networks.
810 Techies in the Shadows – Bryan Cantrill, creator of DTrace, Sun Microsystems
DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework for Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, and is likely headed for Linux and other operating systems in the future. It allows people to look inside running software and work out problems while the program executes. What this means is that DTrace allows enterprise software to be far better tuned and debugged because both system administrators and developers can inspect the running code. DTrace could be a game changer for enterprise software, once it gets onto more platforms.
910 Techies in the Shadows – Michael Kuptz, general manager, Lenovos U.S. Division
1010 Techies in the Shadows – Keith McCall, chief technology officer, Azaleos
1110 Techies in the Shadows – Dirk Meyer, president and chief operating officer, AMD
Meyer is considered by many to be the most likely successor to Hector Ruiz, AMD’s current CEO. Meyer has been with AMD since 1995 and started his career by leading the engineering team that eventually produced the AMD Athlon processor. Before AMD, Meyer worked at Digital Equipment.