VII · Modern builders
Jeff Dean · Sanjay Ghemawat
~1968– / 1966–
Google senior fellows · co-authors of MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TPU
Gave us
MapReduce (2004), Bigtable (2006), Spanner (2012), the TPU. The pair-programming partnership that built most of Google's internal infrastructure and, by extension, the playbook for "hyperscale".
The story
They share an office and write papers together; the joke at Google is that they share a brain. The "Jeff Dean facts" meme — "Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler bugs" — exists because the underlying productivity is genuinely unreasonable.
"— "Jeff once shifted a bit so hard, it ended up in another timezone.""
One more thing
There is an entire fan-website of Jeff Dean facts. Sanjay's contribution is doing all the work the facts skip over.