Michael L. Van De Vanter

Personal information


I've been working in Sun Labs (now part of Oracle) for a number of years. I'm currently the principal developer of the Maxine Inspector, an all-in-one debugging and visualization tool for the Open Source Maxine Virtual Machine. An important goal of the Maxine Project is to make VM development and experimentation more productive and available to a wider range of people than has been possible in the past.
I've worked on a number of other projects during my years at Sun/Oracle, both in the Labs and outside, for example on a DARPA-funded project studying the productivity of software development in the High Performance Computing world.
My Ph.D. research was at UC Berkeley in a compiler group led by Susan L. Graham, where I focused on the architecture and usability of language-based editing tools. Somewhat earlier I earned my Masters at MIT (program proving) and B.S. at Stanford (Math/Algebra/Logic).


The productivity of software development in all aspects: languages, tools, and practices. A particular focus is on the usability (human factors) of software development tools, an area that, as the proverbial cobbler's children wanted for shoes, receives far too little attention.

History


14 years 2 weeks