Maciej Stachowiak (; born June 6, 1976) is a Polish American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc., where he is a leader of the development team responsible for the WebKit Framework. A longtime proponent of open source software, Stachowiak was involved with the SCWM, GNOME and Nautilus projects for Linux before joining Apple. He is actively involved the development of web standards, served as a co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML 5 working group and was a member of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group steering committee.
Education After graduating from East High School (Rochester, New York) in 1994,Maciej Stachowiak's Facebook Profile, Retrieved 2010-01-17. Stachowiak was accepted into MIT where he completed Course 6 - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and received both his S.B. and M.Eng. in 1998.Maciej Stachowiak's LinkedIn Profile, Retrieved 2010-01-17.
While at MIT Stachowiak worked on the Rethinking CS101 project,Lynn Andrea Stein's Students , Retrieved 2010-01-17. and in 1997 he began the Scheme Constraints Window Manager project with Greg J. Badros.InformIT: SCWM: The Scheme Constraints Window Manager > Background Retrieved 2010-01-17. He also contributed to a paper with the Cognitive & Neural Sciences Office of Naval Research.Training Spatial Knowledge Acquisition Using Virtual Environments, Retrieved 2010-01-17. Stachowiak's MIT M.Eng. thesis on "Automated Extraction of Structured data from HTML Documents" was indicative of his early interest in web standards and development.Automated Extraction of Structured Data from HTML Documents, Retrieved 2010-01-17.
Career Eazel From 1999 to 2001, Stachowiak contributed to various Linux software projects and was employed by Eazel as one of their lead developers along with Andy Hertzfeld and Darin Adler to create the Nautilus file manager. He was also a developer on the Object Activation Framework (OAF) for the GNOME desktop environment from 1999 to 2001. In 1999, he became a maintainer for the Scheme interpreter for Guile.A Brief History of Guile, by Andy Wingo Retrieved 2010-01-17. During his employment at Eazel, Stachowiak also contributed to Eye of GNOME, GNOME Libs, Gravevine, GnoP, and was a Developer on Medusa, Bonobo, and GNOME VFS. Stachowiak was also a member of GNOME Foundation board of directors.Advogato: Personal info for mjs, Retrieved 2010-01-17. He told Fortune magazine, "[Eazel's] seemed like a borderline-crazy business plan ... But I said, 'Sure, I'll work on it.'" while his colleagues "fidgeted uncomfortably". Two months later, Eazel ceased operations, laying off its entire staff.
Apple Inc. After the closure of Eazel, most of the remaining senior engineers (including Bud Tribble, Don Melton, Darin Adler, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and Stachowiak) joined Apple's Safari team in June 2001 and were later joined by Netscape/Mozilla Firefox alumnus David Hyatt. On June 13, 2002, Stachowiak announced on a mailing list that Apple was releasing JavaScriptCore, a framework for Mac OS X that was based on KDE's JavaScript engine.[KDE-Darwin] JavaScriptCore, Apple's JavaScript framework based on KJS, Retrieved 2010-01-17. Through the WebKit project, JavaScriptCore has since evolved into SquirrelFish Extreme, a JavaScript engine that compiles JavaScript into native machine code. On June 6, 2005, WebKit was made open source (which was coincidentally Stachowiak's birthday).
Web standards participation Stachowiak wrote on behalf of Apple along with members of the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in a proposal that the new HTML working group of the W3C adopt the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group’s HTML5 as the starting point of its work.Proposal to Adopt HTML5 from Maciej Stachowiak on 2007-04-10 Retrieved 2010-01-17. On 9 May 2007, the new HTML working group resolved to do that. In May 2009, Stachowiak co-authored the W3C HTML Design Principles for HTML5, one of his first major documentation projects for the W3C.HTML Design Principles, W3C Working Draft 26 May 2009 , Retrieved 2010-01-17. As of 27 August 2009, Stachowiak has co-chaired the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group along with IBM's Sam Ruby and Microsoft's Paul Cotton.Apple WebKit engineer named co-chair of HTML Working Group, Retrieved 2010-01-17.Apple gets higher profile in HTML standardization - CNET News
WebKit, the underpinnings of Safari, was published as open-source software on June 6, 2005. When Safari was run with this latest version of WebKit, it passed the Web Standards Project's Acid2 test. Stachowiak reported on the WebKit blog on March 26, 2008, that the software had passed 100/100 on the Acid3 test, making Safari the first browser to pass.Surfin' Safari: WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build, Retrieved 2008-03-26.Surfin' Safari: Full pass of Acid3, Retrieved 2008-9-31.
References
External links Surfin' Safari - a weblog dedicated to discussing WebKit development, by various members of the WebKit team