Bryan Cantrill

Who is Bryan Cantrill?

Bryan M. Cantrill is an American software engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition of Sun. He left Oracle on July 25, 2010 to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent.

Cantrill was born in Vermont, later moving to Colorado, where he attained the rank of Eagle Scout. He studied computer science at Brown University, spending two summers at QNX Software Systems doing kernel development. Upon completing his B.Sc. in 1996, he immediately joined Sun Microsystems to work with Jeff Bonwick in the Solaris Performance Group.

In 2005 Bryan Cantrill was named one of the 35 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's magazine. Cantrill was included in the TR35 list for his development of DTrace, a function of the OS Solaris 10 that provides a non-invasive means for real-time tracing and diagnosis of software. Sun technologies and technologists, including DTrace and Cantrill, also received an InfoWorld Innovators Award that year. In 2006, "The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest." In 2008, Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal were recognized with the USENIX Software Tools User Group award for "the provision of a significant enabling technology."