Mike Samuel

[hipstersmoothie]

Notes: creator of Google Calendar, 17+ years at Google

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Calendar
• https://bsky.app/profile/mvsamuel.bsky.social
• https://github.com/mikesamuel
• https://temper.systems/
• https://temperlang.github.io/tpac2025/Templates/Overview.html

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The Google Journey & Problem Discovery

• You created Google Calendar as a 20% project - can you walk us through how that came to be and what the early development was like?
• Google Calendar became one of the most widely-used productivity tools globally. What were the biggest technical challenges in building something that had to scale to hundreds of millions of users at that time?
• You spent over a decade on Google's security engineering team and were part of the 10-person common infrastructure team supporting 10,000+ engineers. What does that kind of role even look like?
• At what point did you start noticing the "disconnected language islands" problem? Was there a specific moment or project where it became clear this was a fundamental issue?

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Temper

• You worked on standards committees (TC39, W3C, CalConnect). How did that experience shape your understanding of the problem?
• Why a programming language? Why not a transpiler or code generation tool?
• You describe Temper as designed for "libraries that support programs" rather than applications. Why that focus?
• Walk us through a concrete example: If I'm a developer who really understands HTML sanitization, how does Temper let me solve that problem for everyone?
• You've been working on this for six years - two years understanding the problem space, four implementing. What made this so hard?
• Most languages that compile to multiple targets (Scala, Kotlin, Dart) still run in their own runtime. You're translating to native code in each language. What's the fundamental difference in approach?

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The Translation Process

• Walk us through what happens when I write Temper code. What does the compiler do?
• You mention "literate programming" with Markdown - can you tell us what that looks like?
• How do you handle the "edit-compile-test" loop? Is it fast enough for real development?
• What about interop - can Temper code call native libraries in each target language?

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Real-World Applications

• You presented at W3C TPAC 2025 about using Temper for web standards. How could this help standards bodies?
• The CSS Color Module 4 example in your presentation - walk us through how Temper could help browser implementers and tool builders

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The Future

• What are the next major milestones for Temper?
• In your Medium article about AI and coding, you argue that the reports of coding's death are "greatly exaggerated." How does Temper fit into that vision? What do you think the future of programming looks liek?