I'm now at Google, where I work on large scale distributed computation, including systems like MapReduce, Pregel, and Dataflow. I am a former chair of the C++ standardization committee's library working group, and the project editor for the standardization committee's Technical Report on Standard Library Extensions. My book about the C++ Standard Template Library, Generic Programming and the STL is available from Addison-Wesley.
I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1994; my advisor was Bob Cahn, and my dissertation was on the phenomenology of the hypothesized Z' particle. I also did some experimental work with the CDF collaboration in grad school, and participated in the discovery of the top quark. Since then I have worked at SGI, where I was the principal implementor of the SGI STL; at AT&T Research; and at Apple. I'm no longer working on gcc, but my professional interests continue to include compilers, language design, library research, and generic programming.
I live in Palo Alto with my wife Janet Lafler, our teenager Al Lafler-Austern, and our cats Nicki and Quinn. Our old cats Randy and Oliver, alas, are no longer with us.
