computer science

Maciej Stachowiak

Maciej Stachowiak is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Maciej Stachowiak rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Maciej Stachowiak belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Maciej Stachowiak to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Maciej Stachowiak from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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, 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. While at MIT Stachowiak worked on the Rethinking CS101 project, and in 1997 he began the Scheme Constraints Window Manager project with Greg J. Badros. He also contributed to a paper with the Cognitive & Neural Sciences Office of Naval Research. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

References

External links Surfin' Safari - a weblog dedicated to discussing WebKit development, by various members of the WebKit team Maciej Stachowiak on X

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Maciej Stachowiak

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Maciej Stachowiak claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Maciej Stachowiak before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Maciej Stachowiak ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Maciej Stachowiak

In research: Maciej Stachowiak appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Maciej Stachowiak in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Maciej Stachowiak is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1976 births, American people of Polish descent, Apple Inc. employees, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Maciej Stachowiak outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Maciej Stachowiak in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Maciej Stachowiak means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Maciej Stachowiak out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Maciej Stachowiak in simple terms?

Why does Maciej Stachowiak matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Maciej Stachowiak?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Maciej Stachowiak.