I studied mathematics and management. In my first jobs (in the 1980's),
I started to work with computers and learned more and more about them.
During my carriere I did lots of things with computers, based on how
they were mainly used in that time. Sometimes I wrote complicated
models, other times I installed administration programs, and another
time I wrote networkprograms. I worked for all kind of companies, like
universities, manufacturies and other companies.
These days I stopped working (for money) and just do what I like. And
one thing I am interested in is "artificial intelligence". In the 1908's
this was by guru's considered the third wave of automation, after
"island automation" and "network automation". They were right in the
first two waves, so it is likely they also predicted the third wave
correctly.
greetings: Jos Theelen
On 2015-04-11 20:08, Matthew Taylor 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
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