Recommendation for Tai-Wei (aka David) Lin

During my many years at Sun, I was fortunate to work with many talented individuals, many of whom got together to form a kickass team and pretty cool service. This is my recommendation for Tai-Wei (aka David) Lin.

David was one of the first engineers on the Sun Software Library (aka Project O'Malley) team, joining a grassroots effort to first prove the idea then work on implementation. David has taken on many different engineering roles during the project lifecycle, constantly and successfully learning new technologies and approaches on demand, all in the spirit of helping the team in any way possible, regardless of personal considerations. During this project, David demonstrated his ability to learn and adapt quickly, as well as lead a development effort through complex and ever changing technologies.

Initially, David took on implementation responsibilities for the user interface. During the project inception phases, as the effort evolved from vague ideas to concreteness, the UI needed to constantly change as well. The project also had technology requirements to develop a Rich Internet Application (RIA) user interface, using somewhat modern but not yet fully mature Web development technologies - JavaScript and Ajax. At the time (mid 2006), development and testing tools for these technologies were quite primitive and immature. To demonstrate the feasibility of RIA technologies and help refine our stakeholders' ideas, David successfully build several different user interfaces - exploring different look and feels as well as analyzing alternative JavaScript and Ajax based software libraries: Yahoo YUI Library, Dojo, JSF, Ext JS, and jQuery. Ultimately, the project settled on Ext JS. David never complained about all the work that was discarded, viewing it as a learning experience, both for him as an individual, and for the project as a whole.

David never hesitated to try new technologies (a must with the quickly evolving Web based RIA user interfaces), and develop tools as necessary. For example, at one point during our development cycles, our startup performance was abysmal. David took the time to truly understand the core of the problem (some would say this is the hardest part), find a way to measure the issue (so he could actually be sure that he's improving the performance), search for existing solutions, implement what he found, then shared it via various webinars, forum postings, and blog entries.

After the project was established and fully funded, David demonstrated his leadership skills by leading the Web UI development team - he took on this responsibility simply because there was a need, not because he was asked to do it. He helped tackle complex technical issues, set direction for implementation, and assisted new team members onto the team, mentoring them as necessary to ensure they become successful. Ultimately, David's efforts paid off. Our engineering VP and primary executive sponsor called the Web UI a "pretty slick UI" - publicly
complimenting the work.

Time management and priority management are also David's strengths. While he was busy implementing various aspects Project O'Malley, David attended the local Toast Master's club, and began studying almost full time for his MBA. He also applied many of the concepts he learned at business school on the project: at one point, during a conflict with our users over approach, he mediated among the different parties, helping reach a reasonable compromise.

David is highly intelligent, dedicated, works extremely hard, and would make a very successful team lead and/or group manager. I highly recommend him.