I'm seeing many new faces in our community, and I keep wondering about the skill sets you folks have. Does anyone want to describe their technical programming prowess? Here is your chance to brag about your history. I'll go first ;)...
I started seriously programming around 2002 in PHP and FORTRAN77, believe it or not. I had taken no college classes at all at the time, but I was an analyst at a company that was doing lots of complex military defense simulations in FORTRAN. I was doing PHP as a hobby and learning relational databases in MySQL (when it was free as in beer). I finally went to school and learned Java while I was working on Java wrappers to our FORTRAN applications so scientists, engineers, and pilots could actually use the simulations without intense technical help. This involved a lot of Swing GUI work, so I started getting more into front-end technology at that time. I quit my job and moved to St. Louis to work as a freelance software contractor, landing almost entirely Java jobs for several years, but getting a breadth of experience in some diverse fields, but always supporting scientific research in some way. Jobs working for banks are boring. ;) Then I got into Groovy, a functional and dynamically typed JVM language with very tight integration with Java. This really piqued my interested in functional programming, and I got involved in the Lambda Lounge group that was just starting up [1]. We were mostly disgruntled Java programmers who wanted to work in more interesting language paradigms, and I believe we changed the programming landscape in St. Louis to be much more polyglot. Somehow I networked with the right people and got a job for G2One, a startup that included the founders of the Groovy language and the Grails web framework. At this time, I was working a bit on Grails itself, and implementing a GUI plugin that integrated Javascript as a collection of server-side pages, so backend programmers didn't have to mess around with the JS (this was before Javascript was considered a "serious" programming language to most people). Then SpringSource bought G2One (I was a contractor, so I didn't get a payoff), and I was laid off after 6 months. Eventually VMWare bought SpringSource, Pivotal took over all the Groovy Grails stuff, and then dropped it all and it moved to the Apache Foundation. Anyway I still have a good relationship with all the Groovy/Grails folks, and I still have a deep-seeded love for the elegant Groovy language. During my time working on GrailsUI (the Grails Javascript plugin), I worked extensively with YUI, the Yahoo! User Interface Javascript library. So I emailed the YUI time a bit and got to know them, which was great because David Glass helped me get a job at Yahoo! and I moved my entire family from St. Louis to Cupertino. I worked at Yahoo! for 2 years maintaining and building Javascript frameworks. I learned a lot about Javascript, and that helped me get a job as a Frontend Engineer at Numenta. When Numenta approached me, I was really surprised, because I'd been a follower for a long time (since reading On Intelligence), and I had always dreamed of working on something I thought was so important. So I went from F2E at Numenta to Manager of Web Services, helping build out REST APIs and such. Then when Numenta got the open source bug, I jumped at the chance to help make open source NuPIC a reality. And here I am. :) [1] http://lambdalounge.org/ Who's next? --------- Matt Taylor OS Community Flag-Bearer Numenta
