Fergus Henderson

Fergus Henderson has been a software engineer at Google since 2006. He started programming as a kid in 1979, and went on to academic research in programming language design and implementation. With his PhD supervisor, he co-founded a research group at the University of Melbourne that developed the programming language Mercury. He has been a program committee member for eight international conferences, and has released over 500,000 lines of open-source code. He was a former moderator of the Usenet newsgroup comp.std.c++ and was an officially accredited “Technical Expert” for the ISO C and C++ committees. He also has over 15 years of commercial software industry experience, starting with his first full-time industry job, as a COBOL programmer (for Australian company Frontier Software) at the age of 16. He spent 2.5 years working at Galois, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, where he developed a compiler from Cryptol (a domain-specific functional programming language for cryptography) to FPGA hardware. At Google, he was one of the original developers of Blaze, a build tool now used across Google, and worked on the server-side software behind speech recognition and voice actions (before Siri!) and speech synthesis. He currently manages Google's text-to-speech engineering team, but still writes and reviews plenty of code. Software that he has written is installed on over a billion devices.