Chris Laffra

During my 20 year career in IT, I designed and implemented numerous languages, compilers, IDEs, toolkits, run-times, APIs, and life cycle development tools. Examples are tools to monitor and analyse performance of Eclipse applications and solutions to optimize Eclipse startup and memory consumption. See http://bit.ly/EclipseViz, slide 13 and 25

My motto while developing software is "less is more". I not only consume technology, but also like making existing complex software more accessible to others. I share my experience with others in the form of forum posts, blogs, and books.

The book I am most proud of is the "Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs" book. Part of the book was a chapter on how to write your own IDE. There are so many steps involved, that I decided to write a tool to generate IDEs from a language grammar. That eventually led to the Eclipse IMP project: http://bit.ly/EclipseIMP.

Previously, I was the architect and chief contributor of EGL Rich UI; a technology that adds support for web2.0, Ajax, Dojo, and rich user interfaces to IBM's newest business development language called EGL, see: http://bit.ly/EglCafe.

I also developed various EGL web apps, such as conference schedulers and a Google Voice dialer. These web apps target the iPhone platform and use compression, the latest HTML5 extensions, and make web apps look like native apps.

In May 2010, I joined the global market and risk assessment team at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, working on a comprehensive platform/API for trading, risk calculation, reporting, and pricing. My office is at the Bank of America Tower in midtown Manhattan. I have an awesome view of Bryant Park.

Specialties Computer language design and implementation. Compiler design. Visualization. Profilers. IDE development. Eclipse. Technical writing. Technology Evaluation. Seeing the Bigger Picture. Public Speaking. Java. Performance. EGL. Web2.0. Ajax. Javascript. Out of the Box Thinking.