For some history, the Jeff that he keeps talking about is a former student of mine at Stanford. I wasn't a big deal at Stanford, I was a TA for a Xerox PARC guy, when he retired Stanford asked me if I'd teach the class.
This was the papers class in operating systems. If you don't know what "papers class" means it means there are no text books, this is where you go to learn at the cutting edge. Pretty advanced class and Stanford let me teach it. To this day I wonder what they were thinking. That said, I'm proud of how I taught that class. The students learned a lot.
Jeff Bonwick was a student who was doing a major in statistics. Somehow he ended up in that OS class. I could tell he was sharp and I was working at Sun in the kernel group, I recruited him as hard as I could. He asked me why I would want him, his exact words were "I can't program in C". I told him that I could teach him how to program, I can't teach people how to be smart. He was very, very smart. I told him when he came to Sun he would go far higher than I ever did and I was right, he did.
Bryan is cut from the same cloth. He's an OS geek. There aren't many of those geeks around these days. Go him.