Biography:
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of
Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1987–1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation in
1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML
1.0 and co-edited “Namespaces in XML” between 1996 and 1999, founded
Antarctica Systems in 1999, and served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the
W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002–2004. Currently, he serves as Director
of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, publishes a popular weblog, and co-
chairs the IETF AtomPub Working Group. [From Oram & Wilson’s “Beautiful Code”,
2007]

Abstract:
The good news is that we make progress in hardware, and in software at both the
infrastructure and application levels. The other good news is that there are still lots
of hard problems that we don't know how to solve. This will be a tour through some
of the gnarliest and ugliest things that keep the leaders of the software community
awake at nights. My completely-un-hidden agenda is to get the student audience
worried about some of them too, so you can spend some of your nights trying to
solve them in ways nobody's thought of yet, instead of wasting your time sleeping.