Mike Samuel - Google Calendar, Temper Language, Web Standards

This week we're joined by Mike Samuel, creator of Google Calendar and a programming languages expert who has spent 17+ years at Google working on security infrastructure and web standards.

Mike shares the fascinating story of building Google Calendar in 2006 during the early days of Ajax and JavaScript-heavy web applications, when there were no module systems and teams were building bespoke tooling to make Java developers productive at producing JavaScript.

We dive deep into Temper, Mike's ambitious six-year project to solve the "disconnected language islands" problem. Temper is a programming language designed from the ground up to translate well to multiple target languages, allowing developers to write libraries once and support all major programming language communities.

Mike also discusses his work with TC39, W3C, and CalConnect standards committees, his tenure on Google's security engineering team supporting 10,000+ engineers, and his vision for the future of cross-language software development in an increasingly multi-language, AI-assisted world.

• https://bsky.app/profile/mvsamuel.bsky.social
• https://github.com/mikesamuel
• https://temper.systems/

Sections

• [00:00:00] Introduction
• [00:02:00] Building Google Calendar in 2006
• [00:10:00] Early JavaScript Ecosystem and Closure Compiler
• [00:17:00] Security Engineering at Google
• [00:20:00] The Kaja Project and Object Capabilities
• [00:28:00] WebAssembly and Runtime Philosophies
• [00:35:00] The Problem of Language Multiplicity
• [00:40:00] Introducing Temper: Cross-Language Translation
• [00:50:00] Language Design Constraints
• [00:58:00] Literate Programming and Developer Experience
• [01:08:00] AI, Security, and the Future of Software Development