Tom Ball
Redwood City, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarTom Ball is a veteran Java engineer and technical leader with decades of experience driving language metamodeling, middleware, and developer tools work, now based in Redwood City. He created and led Google’s open-source j2objc project, translating Java to Objective-C and keeping its runtime aligned with evolving Java versions—work that demonstrates deep runtime and cross-platform expertise. At Sun and Google he helped shape core Java technologies (AWT, Swing, debugger APIs, JavaFX tooling) and led developer productivity teams and internal app platforms. He combines hands-on systems and compiler work with leadership in large engineering organizations, often focusing on performance tuning and maintainability. An early Java adopter (since the Oak days), he continues contributing to open-source runtime code and build/test improvements. Tom’s background reveals a rare blend of low-level platform craftsmanship and practical product-facing tool design.
15 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (11)
openjdk10
javas10
oraclejdk10
jdk1710
java10
java-nio9
build-automation8
network-programming8
testing7
protobuffer5
protobuf5
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
google/j2objc
Sep 2012 - Jan 2023
A Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 releases, 37 reviews, 2868 commits in 10 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits primarily focused on adding or updating java.util classes to OpenJDK and Android's libcore. These changes involved incorporating updates to networking components, handling cookie management during URL redirection, and addressing string literal issues. In addition, the user made adjustments to the J2ObjC build processes, improving test coverage and resolving build issues by fixing internal dependencies, along with the addition of support for Java 10 and 11 API additions, suggesting a focus on maintaining a functional and up-to-date Java runtime environment.
objective-ctranslation-tooltranslationruntimeios
harrycheung/j2objc
Sep 2012 - Feb 2015
Contributions:1330 commits in 2 years 5 months
objective-ctranslation-tooltranslationruntimeios
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