Kris Kowal

“Software engineering is a field of compromises. Build things such that other engineers can understand and modify them for future needs, but also meet performance and availability metrics and get it done on a fixed schedule. So the resulting code is usually a bit ugly, and usually following a common pattern even if it doesn't quite fit. So what has always amazed me about Kris is his ability to seemingly avoid all compromise, and come up with elegant, easy-to-follow, easy-to-extend, highly-available solutions to the problems he is given. I always enjoyed our discussions on how to solve a problem, because we often had very different solutions but the discussions were always very relaxed, with an egoless "How did you come to this design decision?" type of probing that facilitates reaching the best solution, rather than simply pitting the two solutions against each other to decide which is better. The simultaneous breadth and depth of knowledge of data structures and their application in a variety of circumstances I wouldn't have thought of always amazes me (just follow his Twitter account for examples :) ). I will still always complain, though, about his decision for promises in Javascript to resolve after the next tick of the event loop, which prevents all code from being written with them for performance reasons (having to tear down the Javascript execution environment, wait for the C++ event loop to execute its own tasks, decide if your promise is going to be the next-executed scope or not, and then 1 or more scope-and-stack creations later finally resolve even if the data was already there) -- there could have been a potential evolution of Javascript where not even async/await is necessary -- it just happens implicitly in the engine as all variables are actually promises and the event loop acts more like a kernel scheduler in a single CPU, multiprocess environment with promise value access like a syscall that can return a value immediately if already available. I hope its clear that if that's the level of beef I have with him, he's an absolutely amazing developer and person. :)”

“I hired Kris at Apple. Kris is an excellent software engineer. He is a rare breed in this modern era of specialist expertise: a person who genuinely knows a lot about a lot of aspects of software development. I always felt comfortable giving a task to Kris, whether it was in C, AppleScript, Objective-C, Python, or whatever, because I knew that if he didn't know how to do it, he would learn, and quickly. Being able to "learn how to learn" has become a cliche in this industry for people who graduated from high-caliber yet undervalued colleges, but Kris actually fulfills the promise the phrase represents. He is able to learn things quickly, to execute upon them, and to make his ideas reality in the space it takes his synapses to fire and his fingers to type. He is the rare 10x everyone is searching for, and I recommend him wholeheartedly. If I had enough cash on hand, I'd hire Kris again for my own company. If you have questions about Kris, feel free to call me at: 831-809-9751”