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
Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist who specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He is most famous for designing the Scala programming language, but was also involved in creating Generic Java and Pizza, as well as building the current generation of javac, the Java compiler.… Read more
Roberto Ierusalimschy together with Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, wrote Lua. Lua is widely used in video games such as World of Warcraft and Angry Birds, and is now regularly ranked amongst the most-used computer languages… Read more
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
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
David Fitzjarrell is well known amongst Oracle developers for his knowledge of database performance tuning and problem solving/resolution. He is an Oracle ACE, and an Oracle DBA Group Lead. He is the prinipal author of "Oracle Exadata Survival Guide", from Apress.… Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
PowerShell has radically improved the ease of monitoring and adminstering Windows-based servers, and automating routine processes. The visionary leader of this project is Jeffery Snover, who is now Lead Architect for both Windows Server and System Center Datacenter. … Read more
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