Hi everyone, I'm not sure about the prowess bit, but my first programming was at school in BASIC written in pencil in a grid of boxes which was then posted by snail mail to Reading University. I never got anything to run. At University I had advanced to FORTRAN IV typed on punched cards. I never got anything to run. As a lab project two of us tried to build a cassette tape interface controlled by an Intercil 6100 which ran the PDP-8 instruction set. It didn't work. At the same time I also played with a friend's kit built from a US design (6502 processor, 256 bytes of memory and a hex keypad using two twitches and 16 pins) and another friend's UK-101 (BASIC, 4KB memory).
At work I started on an AIM-65 (practice) and some Intel development system. I actually managed to get something working this time, a controller for a printer with two daisy wheels to be trialled for short cheque runs, which was written in 8086 and PL/M and flashed onto EEPROM. I was in a electrical engineering lab and the circuit breaker tripped about once a day, usually destroying the 8-inch floppy in the drive. After that I progressed to FORTRAN 77 on a PDP-11/44. Until we upgraded from 256KB to 512KB we had to each take one day off from editing. I did an RSX-11/M internals course which was great fun. After that I went back to university to do a an MSc in Computer Science. Because I'd been working long enough I qualified for a 4K GBP grant (a lot in 1984). I don't think it works like that in the UK now. After that I spent time in AI for defence applications (mainly Prolog, and 68020 and microcoding for a hardware Prolog machine). Then a 3-year research fellowship in a cognitive science department, with some AI but mostly compiler design related to the AI development environment. Then AI in a commercial setting - seven years presenting a three-year research plan every 6 months to Japan, having it rejected, and repeated until getting fed up. They wanted patents, and didn't understand the UK's "mental acts" restrictions. The early work was in Prolog and we switched to Java when it came out. I also did lots of C to support the work and some for the NLP group. Being Japanese owned, and therefore anti support staff, I also set up and ran the computer network. Mainly Suns but I even got to go on a VAX/VMS course. Then automated systems management with BMC Patrol and some HP stuff for telecoms and banking. After that I was mainly telco focussed, first with a company that had a UML-based object-oriented development environment for concurrent systems, but which the European arm decided to build provisioning and mediation applications with. I had a not-so-short break courtesy of the telco crash, followed by contracts with IBM, in Morocco and and several in France. I used PERL a lot during this time and then recoded in the target language because the latter was slow to build and a nightmare to debug. Since then I've switched to Ruby and for the last 5 years Python as my preferred do-anything language. I also had two permanent jobs in the last ten years. One in Morocco, looking after an Egyptian telco. For the last year I switch to local projects in Java and C++. The other as a technical director of a firm making a mobile application development environment. I'm still waiting for my last salary cheque from two years ago. There I did lots of development as well, mainly with Tomcat and then Javascript. I picked up an interest in MongoDB, Node.js and AngularJS during that time but didn't use them in anger. Most recently I did another 3-month service provisioning project, with lots of Python support code (good) on ancient versions of Python (not quite so good), and wrote and gave a 5-day training course on what has now become Tibco Fulfillment Provisioning 3.8. Currently I am a part-time chauffer (wife and kids), starting to apply for English teaching jobs (I don't live in the UK any more), and learning about brains on coursera. At the moment I'm also learning more about wordpress, story board creation and Blender for 2-D animation to support a extra-curricular project that my wife is doing. Robert On 11 April 2015 at 19:08, Matthew Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
