Voices » engineer

Walking the Censorship Tightrope With Google's Marissa Mayer

James Turner — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:03:56 +0000

By James Turner, Contributing Editor, O’Reilly Radar

Google (GOOG) sometimes finds itself at a difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google’s most critical product areas, such as search, maps, and Chrome.

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New Yorker iPhone Cover Lifts Sales for Brushes App

Jenna Wortham — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:22:51 +0000

By Jenna Wortham, Reporter, New York Times

Artist Jorge Colombo may have drawn the dreamy, nocturnal cityscape of Manhattan on the June 1 cover, using his iPhone, but a software engineer named Steve Sprang built Brushes, the iPhone application that transformed Mr. Columbo’s swipes into digital strokes.

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Ex-Yahoo Engineer Now Terror Suspect in India

Eric Savitz — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:29:15 +0000

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

So, uh, this would not be your traditional career path for Yahoo (YHOO) engineers.

The Hindustan Times reports that Mohammed Peerbhoy, who is currently in custody in Delhi for allegedly serving as the “media chief” for the Indian Mujahideen, a terror group charged with the September 2008 bombings in the city, turns out to be a former principal software engineer with Yahoo in Pune.

According to the story, Peerbhoy is being charged with sending IM warning messages just before the blasts ripped apart the city.

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Apple's Brilliant Video Engineer: Anonymous No More

Harry McCracken — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:00:45 +0000

By Harry McCracken, Blogger, Technologizer

My favorite moment at this year’s Macworld Expo keynote had nothing to do with any of the products that were unveiled–it was was about the unveiling of a person.

At last year’s Macworld Expo keynote, Steve Jobs waxed rhapsodic about the Apple engineer who had gone on vacation to the Cayman Islands, shot video, and had trouble editing it–and who then invented the all-new, simpler iMovie as a result. He couldn’t have spoken more highly about the guy, but he never mentioned his name. I pinged an Apple (AAPL) contact to ask who this brilliant Apple employee was, and got a prompt and polite note back saying that they wouldn’t disclose his name.

After I wrote about this experience and said that I thought Apple should give its developers some glory–as it did in the early days of the Mac–I got an email from someone who said that the iMovie inventor was surely Randy Ubillos, one of the creators of Adobe (ADBE) Premiere.

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