J.D. Zamfirescu: About

I teach programming & electronics as an adjunct at CCA and Berkeley, and make tools & study human-robot interaction as a research scientist at Stanford’s Center for Design Research.

My recent projects include Rudy, an visual interpreter for JavaScript using p5.js and Winston the robot bartender.

Previously, I helped people discover and develop their passions at Workshop Weekend and I co-founded EtherPad, where I primarily worked on backend development. Among other things, I wrote EtherPad’s comet / server-push channel (from scratch); the AppJet appserver that served as EtherPad’s web server, in Scala; and AppJet’s JavaScript runtime, based on Rhino.

At Google in 2006-7, I worked on Google Health in the New York office. After EtherPad was acquired by Google in 2009, I moved to Sydney to work on on Wave and later moved back to San Francisco to work on App Engine. During my few months on the Wave team I led the technical side of the Wave open source initiative and presented at Google I/O 2010.

I also was a founding director of Learning Unlimited, a start-up nonprofit dedicated to spreading an educational enrichment program, Splash, to universities across the United States. Splash programs bring local high school and middle school students to a university for a weekend of classes on anything and everything, from quantum mechanics to copyright law, sushi-making, and neuroscience. (I helped re-start Stanford Splash in 2008, and taught at MIT Splash while an undergrad at MIT.)