Kevin Bourrillion

Hello! Nice to meet you.

The other me’s

I’m kevinb9n most places.

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Work

After a few startups I worked at Google for nearly two decades (2004 to 2024). In 2007 I founded the Java Core Libraries (now Java And Kotlin Ecosystem) team and stayed with it rest of my time there. Then I was hit with the layoff hammer and now I’m enjoying some me-time.

If you’re very curious, you could learn a bit about the kind of stuff I do from the start of this video until you get bored. My mission is basically to make the world’s Java code more readable, bug-proof, and adaptable, any way I can.

Things I did

I’ve played some important part in creating the following things. Clearly I love to collaborate. Often it might sound like I didn’t do that much, but listen man.

I’m not able to pay much active attention to them nowadays.

• I founded Guava with much early help from Jared Levy, Mike Bostock, Joshua Bloch, Jesse Wilson, Bob Lee, Chris Povirk, Louis Wasserman, Chris Nokleberg, and others. I spearheaded, but it would be ludicrous to think I could have done it alone.
• I helped Bob Lee (crazybob) create Guice 1.0. A fair amount of the API design is me. The fact that it worked was all Bob. Working with him was a fantastic and formative experience for me, and I mourn his loss tremendously.
• AutoValue was my idea/design and I sort of product-managed and tech-wrote. Éamonn McManus made it happen and has maintained it well.
• I worked as hard on google-java-format as it’s possible to work on a thing without writing any of the code. It is really the creation of John DeTreville and Liam Miller-Cushon. I made tough decisions and ate the flak.
• Jesse Wilson, Gregory Kick, and I created Caliper. It’s dying now; JMH is… just better.
• I’ve been involved in Error Prone (including Refaster) since its early days, helping Alex Eagle, Liam Miller-Cushon, Eddie Aftandillian, and Louis Wasserman (again, like most Google projects, many people have contributed).
• Deep API discussions and reviews for Truth (Christian Gruber, Chris Povirk, Kurt Kluever), David Beaumont’s Flogger, and Colin Decker’s jimfs. For whatever it matters, I still believe these are all excellent libraries, which might be better known if we had really evangelized them.
• I was Google’s representative to JSR 330, JSR 335, Project Valhalla, Project Amber. For the ones still active I’m now an individual member. Particularly with Valhalla I’ve had some influence on the design, so I hope y’all like it when it gets here.

Things I wrote

• Google Java Style Guide, with Erik Hilsdale. This is probably (?) the most-adopted Java style guide in the world, and several other guides have been derived from it (examples: Android, Javascript).
• Understanding classes and types in Java
• Data in Java programs: a basic conceptual model
• More should be coming soon in 2024…

Current projects

• JSpecify working group
• Representative to Project Valhalla working group
• Representative to Project Amber working group

Play

I like board games. My favorite is Terraforming Mars. I have some stuff here fans might be interested in, including a game engine library.

I like math a lot and used to coach a Math Olympiad team for 10-year-olds before covid. I was really good at it aside from the ways in which I was bad at it.

In a good year I’m into cycling and might ride about 4K road miles. In a bad year I’m into sitting on the couch.

Music

I play guitar passably, sing pretty good, play drums less than passably, play keyboards badly, and (like every guitar player) I fancy that I can play the bass too but can’t really. I love music. I put some stuff up on YouTube, some I feel good about, some I really don’t. I guess I feel good about Ring of Fire.

I like indie-ish pop-ish rock-ish melodic music like Belle & Sebastian and Vampire Weekend. One musical artist very special to me is Melissa Kaplan aka Universal Hall Pass, formerly of Splashdown. If you’ve played the Assassin’s Creed games you’ve actually heard her voice a lot. Her singing, lyrics, vocal arrangements, and overall musicality are out of this world. No one really knows about her, which breaks my heart. Try out this playlist, and if for some reason you don’t like one song just try another.