When I was contacting people about sitting for interviews during JavaOne, I just assumed that Bob Lee (@crazybob) wasn’t going to be around. First, I thought he was still in St. Louis (wrong, he relocated to San Francisco when he became the CTO of Square), I also assumed that he’d steer clear of Oracle’s OpenWorld because of his recent, high-profile role in the Oracle versus Google lawsuit over Android. Well I was wrong on that count, too. Not only was he at the conference, he was presenting. /p>

Lee is one of the reasons the Android platform just works. He was responsible for Android’s core APIs and libraries. His contribution to Google is also greater than just working on one of the most popular mobile platforms in the world. Along with Dhanji Prasanna, Jesse Wilson, and Kevin Bourrillion, Lee was the creator of a dependency framework named Guice. Now Guice isn’t nearly as popular as Spring, but it runs many of Google’s critical applications and it has been incorporated into a few high profile projects, such as Maven. Bottom line: If you use Google’s products and you happen to have an Android phone, Lee’s handiwork is all over the place.

At JavaOne, Lee and I discussed Java references and he fielded a few free-form questions about the Java community. The following video contains the full interview.