Bill Buzbee
The important stuff: married, with three kids and two dogs in a very
noisy house. Grew up in Kansas and moved to Silicon Valley in 1984.
Currently living in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town south of San Francisco.
For the last 20+ years, I've worked as a compiler and language tool software
engineer. Most of that was for Hewlett-Packard - the rest was a four-year
stint at a fun startup called Transmeta.
For the last ten years or so, I've specialized in dynamic translation,
instrumentation and optimization.
[UPDATE: In September of 2008 I took a new job at Google. I'm
currently a staff software engineer on the Android team, where I (along with
another Transmeta veteran - Ben Cheng), developed the Dalvik JIT compiler].
Currently, I have the very cool title of "Senior Research Scientist" at
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto. Sadly, the title does not come
with a white lab smock and the mandate to create mutant superheroes (something
my six-year-old son suggested). Still, I do get to play with some very
cool secret stuff.
Computers are actually a second career for me. I grew up in and around
small daily newspapers. I began delivering papers at age 11 and became a
part-time sports writer at 13. By the time I went to college in the
mid-70's to get my journalism degree I was the assistant sports editor for the
local paper - responsible for stories, layout and headlines for the inside
sports pages.
I continued with journalism, eventually becoming the managing editor of the
Parsons (Kansas) Sun. During the late 70's and early 80's, small daily
newspapers were early adopters of computer technology. Excited by the
possibilities of using computers for information delivery, I quit my job and
headed back to school to learn about computers. My intent was to apply
what I'd learned to newspapers - but at the university I became fascinated with
computer language and never made it back to the newspaper business.
My homebrewcpu project has gotten vastly more attention that I've ever
imagined a silly nerd hobby project could get. It also enabled me to
finally impress the teen-age daughter. Not for doing my own computer, but
for getting a magazine article about me. I was the featured geek in the
summer 2005 issue of ExtremeTech Magazine (a PC Magazine spin-off):
ExtremeTech Interview
And finally, here's a recent resume
