06 April 2016
06 April 2016

Hilary Mason: Geek of the Week

Founder of machine intelligence research company Fast Forward Labs, Hilary Mason is the Data-Scientist-in-residence at Accel, and the former Chief Scientist at bitly. She is famous for proving that social media users like to share breaking news and current events, but are more likely to read inane gossip, watch sneezing pandas, or play online games.… Read more
05 February 2016
05 February 2016

Alfred Aho: Geek of the Week

Before the advent of PowerShell in Windows, we reached for AWK for those information-processing tasks that required just simple code of a few lines. AWK, and the principles that were embedded in it, became the bedrock of many languages that followed, including Perl. It was created by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan; and it was included in the UNIX distribution. We a asked Alfred Aho how it all came about.… Read more
05 February 2016
05 February 2016

Cleve Moler: Geek of the Week

Matlab was never intended as a commercial product when it was first created by Chris Moler while he was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of New Mexico to help his students with matrix maths. It has since been developed into a more general computer language, and has become immensely popular. We were intrigued as to how and why Matlab came about so we asked Chris Moler.… Read more
27 January 2016
27 January 2016

Jon Gay: Geek of the Week

Nowadays we see Flash as a rather tiresome relic, because we can now achieve almost the same results by using HTML5. When it was first introduced it was a godsend to anyone needing to produce complex effects on a browser. Even today, many popular programs use Flash. We spoke to Jonathan Gay, one of the co-founders of Flash, to understand some of the history behind this groundbreaking framework… Read more
21 January 2016
21 January 2016

Clive Sinclair: Geek of the Week

Although most of the geeks of the IT industry are famous for their software, it was the geeky entrepreneurs that changed society by bringing cheap microcomputers to the market. Sir Clive Sinclair is most famous for applying his background in electronic engineering to provide a whole generation, both in America and Europe, with their first taste of programming.… Read more
14 December 2015
14 December 2015

Chet Ramey: Geek of the Week

The BASH shell is the most popular UNIX command-line scriptable shell. It became the inspiration for PowerShell. As with so many standard components of the Open Source movement, there is a hard-working and dedicated individual who quietly supports the tool over many years. Chet Ramey maintains and extends BASH by himself, and we all give thanks to him for his dedication.… Read more
14 July 2015
14 July 2015

Philip Greenspun: Geek of the Week

Philip Greenspun is probably best known to other geeks for his Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." Amongst the general public, he is most famous for founding ArsDigita and suffering the subsequent miseries that came from accepting venture capital.… Read more
15 April 2015
15 April 2015

Alan Cooper: Geek of the Week

Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He then went on to create Tripod, which morphed eventually into Visual Basic in 1991. Alan remains enthusiastic and interested in development with strong views on Agile and Pair Programming.… Read more
09 April 2015
09 April 2015

Swizec Teller : Geek of the Week

Why do programmers work best at night? Is this related to the idea that drinking alcohol improves cognitive ability? Is programming a young person's game? How do you tackle spaghetti code and avoid job-burnout? Swizek Teller has achieved fame in providing a wry commentary on these questions, and the way that computers have come to dominate our lives.… Read more
06 February 2015
06 February 2015

Conrad Wolfram: Geek of the Week

Conrad Wolfram is the 'younger Wolfram' of Wolfram Research, the company behind Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica. He wants to transform the way in which we engage with mathematics. In particular, he would like to reform mathematics education to make greater use of information technology, and he is also leading the way with interactive publishing technology. … Read more
19 August 2014
19 August 2014

Bjarne Stroustrup, and Programmers With Class

Bjarne Stroustrup devised C++ or 'C with Classes' in 1978. It has evolved a great deal over the decades and and it is still being used today for some of the most demanding programming tasks. Google has acknowledged their debt to the language, and referred to it as 'is the best-performing programming language in the market'. We spoke to Bjarne about the longevity of his creation and how C++ is likely to evolve further.… Read more
10 March 2014
10 March 2014

Paul Randal: Geek of the Week

Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp, together with their small team of experts at SQLSkills.com, dominate the high-end training and consultancy for SQL Server. They help to maintain this domination by virtue of their popular public speaking, and writing. We sent Richard Morris to find out a bit more about Paul, his views about SQL Server, his lifestyle, ambitions and plans.… Read more
07 August 2013
07 August 2013

David Heinemeier Hansson: Geek of the Week

Ruby on Rails, the open-source web application framework, grew out of David Heinemeier Hansson's work on Basecamp at 37Signals. It is now so popular with developers that it has been shipped with Mac OSX since 2007, and has a dedicated Windows following. Rail's focus on software engineering patters and Agile philosophy were so intriguing that we decided that DHH should be Geek of the Week. … Read more
04 December 2012
04 December 2012

Bill Baker: Geek of the Week

Bill Baker had a considerable influence on the way that SQL Server evolved to deliver reporting services and business intelligence. Until 2008, Bill Baker headed the Data Warehouse Product Unit within the SQL Server product development group. His team designed Analysis Services, Integration services, Data Transformation Services and the Admin tools that ship with SQL Server. … Read more
17 September 2012
17 September 2012

Bertrand Meyer: Geek of the Week

Bertrand Meyer, the author of 'Object-oriented Software Construction', renowned teacher, and designer of the Eiffel programming language, believes in simple elegant computer languages. Java, C# and Python all owe much to his pioneering work with Eiffel. He was also deeply involved with .NET from the outset. … Read more