Tom Ball

Retired Software Engineer

Redwood City, California, United States

About

Specialties: Java core, middleware, and developer tools research and development, language metamodeling, performance tuning.

Experience

  • Retirement at Self-employed
    Oct 2025 - Present · 10 mos

  • Google (18 yrs)
    • Staff Software Engineer
      May 2011 - Present · 15 yrs 3 mos

      Created J2ObjC, an open-source Java to Objective-C translation tool and runtime: http://j2objc.org, source at https://github.com/google/j2objc.

    • Tech Lead/Manager
      May 2010 - May 2011 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Tech lead and manager of two internal application teams in Developer Productivity. Both projects are being redesigned, and now use GWT (no more JavaScript cross-platform issues) and Google App Engine for Business (no more pagers!).

    • Member of Technical Staff
      Aug 2008 - Jun 2010 · 1 yr 11 mos

      Member of the Developer Productivity group, currently working on Eclipse support for Google's internal development infrastructure, Google's Java 7 language proposal (ARM), and improved C++ refactoring.

  • Sun Microsystems, Inc. (14 yrs 1 mo)
    • Distinguished Engineer
      Aug 2007 - Aug 2008 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Director-level software engineer, responsible for leading JavaFX Script tools initiatives. Currently leading the team responsible for delivering a compiler and runtime library for this language. This compiler will also provide the language model to support IDE capabilities including advanced editing and refactoring.

    • Technology Director
      Aug 2006 - Aug 2007 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Joined Java team: developed first debugger API, rewrote Windows AWT implementation, co-designed Swing, implemented Jackpot for NetBeans.

    • Senior Staff Engineer
      Aug 1996 - Aug 2006 · 10 yrs 1 mo

      JDK team member: co-designed and implemented new AWT event model for 1.1, co-designed Swing toolkit, managed Java deployment team, Sun Labs researcher, NetBeans core engineer.

  • Staff Engineer at EO, Inc.
    Oct 1991 - Jul 1994 · 2 yrs 10 mos

    Ported GO's Penpoint operating system, email and fax applications to EO PDAs.

  • Staff Engineer at Metaphor
    Mar 1991 - Oct 1991 · 8 mos

    Designed file system API for Patriot Partners project.