Joshua Bloch

Joshua J. Bloch is a software engineer, formerly employed at Google, and a technology author. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework, the java.math package, and the assert mechanism. He is the author of the programming guide Effective Java, which won the 2001 Jolt Award, and is a co-author of two other Java books, Java Puzzlers and Java Concurrency In Practice.
Bloch holds a B.S. in computer science from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. His 1990 thesis was titled A Practical Approach to Replication of Abstract Data Objects and was nominated for the ACM Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Bloch has worked as a Senior Systems Designer at Transarc, and later as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. In June 2004 he left Sun and became Chief Java Architect at Google.
In December 2004, Java Developer's Journal included Bloch in its list of the "Top 40 Software People in the World".