A longtime proponent of open source software, Stachowiak was involved with the SCWM, GNOME and Nautilus projects for Linux before joining Apple.

After graduating from East High School (Rochester, New York) in 1994,[1] Stachowiak was accepted into MIT where he completed Course 6 - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and received both his S.B.

thesis on "Automated Extraction of Structured data from HTML Documents" was indicative of his early interest in web standards and development.

[7] From 1999 to 2001, Stachowiak contributed to various Linux software projects and was employed by Eazel as one of their lead developers along with Andy Hertzfeld and Darin Adler to create the Nautilus file manager.

[1][12] On June 13, 2002, Stachowiak announced on a mailing list that Apple was releasing JavaScriptCore, a framework for Mac OS X that was based on KDE's JavaScript engine.

[15] As of 27 August 2009, Stachowiak has co-chaired the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group along with IBM's Sam Ruby and Microsoft's Paul Cotton.