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
Meredith Ryan - DBA at the Bell Group -was elected by judges and the SQL Server community as the Exceptional DBA of 2012. So who is Meredith, and how did she become a DBA? What makes her exceptional at her work? We sent Richard Morris to investigate.… Read more
When looking for a suitable Geek of the Week, we wondered whether a suitable candidate might be the man who pioneered structured programming, invented modular programming and who wrote one of the first languages with features for Object-oriented programming. Yes, for a second time, Niklaus Wirth, gets the accolade of 'Geek of the Week' and shows that he is still the radical thinker with strong view about computer languages.… Read more
Ron Gruner helped to crate some of the best of Data General's Minicomputers, and then co-founded Alliant, producer of the first parallel supercomputer that was able to decompose programs to run them in parallel. He then became an internet pioneer, who created the successful Shareholder.com site, and is now working on Sky Analytics for benchmarking the costs and expenses of law firms.… Read more
Jenkins, formerly called Hudson, is an open-source server-based Continuous Integration tool that works with all the major Source Control Management (SCM) tools including TFS, and can even script in PowerShell. It is clever software written by a clever geek, Kohsuke Kawaguchi.… Read more
Peldi is one of the most likeable of the new hybrid IT generation; part entrepreneur, part geek. Balsamiq is Peldi's creation, a tool for creating mockups of software. Balsamiq has shown what a good framework Adobe Air is, and how successful single-purpose software that completely fills a need can be.… Read more
Arduino is cheap and simple way that desktop computers can monitor the physical world, and control devices. It is an open-source platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a software development environment, ideal for teaching. We decided to find out more from Tom Igoe, from Arguino's team.… Read more
Ola Bini is one of the core developers for JRuby, and creator of the JvYAML and RbYAML projects. He is also well known for his work on promoting YAML as an alternative markup to XML.… Read more
With the arrival of F# 3.0 Microsoft announced a wide range of improvements such as type providers that made F# a viable alternative to their other .NET languages as a general purpose workhorse. So what exactly are type providers, and why are they a killer reason for using F#? Why should we be considering F# for data-rich applications? To find out, we caught up with Don Syme, F#'s creator, to ask him about the latest developments in F# 3.0 and canvas his views on functional programming in general.… Read more
