Who is Jeff Dean?

A little more on this from my book, “I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59”…

If Urs was Google's architect, Jeff and Sanjay were the master carpenters who raised the roof beams and pounded the nails that held together the load-bearing walls. Wherever problems needed to be solved, "JeffnSanjay" were there*—from devising the Google file system to developing advertising technology, from accelerating machine translation to building breakthrough tools like MapReduce.

Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding. It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school.

Tall, gaunt, and a tad taciturn, with angular features that bring to mind Gary Cooper, Jeff had just left the research center at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to start a new job with a promising dot-com when Urs called him in June 1999. "I wasn't really thinking that he'd change jobs after just three months," said Urs, "but what he said was, 'It's good timing, because I'm bored. I've solved all the technical problems there are to solve at this company, so I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake.'"

Jeff couldn't wait to engage the challenges at Google. He showed up weeks before his official start date, before he'd even left the other company, and wrote code without being on the payroll because he "wanted to hit the ground running."

Edwards, Douglas (2011-07-12). I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (pp. 36-37). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

• achieving incredible speed and massive scale on their search product
• inventing many of systems and paradigms that companies today use to handle big data

Inside Google, Jeff Dean is regarded with awe. Outside the company, few even know his name. But they should. Dean is part of a small group of Google engineers who designed the fundamental software and hardware that underpinned the company’s rise to the web’s most dominant force, and these creations are now mimicked by the rest of the net’s biggest names — not to mention countless others looking to bring the Google way to businesses beyond the web.