JAWZ

With 25 years in the business and still going strong, software development is my mojo. Fads come and go, but the fundamental nuts and bolts of programming haven't changed that much, and there's still something utterly satisfying about seeing it all work!

Early on in my career I chased the innovators, starting off at Xerox working with technology that was way ahead of its time. The Star and the 6085 are museum pieces now, but the mouse, bitmapped GUI, Ethernet and object-oriented programming have set the tone ever since. At AT&T I got to grips with Unix, C, and C++. At Inmos I learned about parallel computing the hard way, by rewriting their Inquest debugger GUI while trying to learn the weirdness of the Win16 API. At Racal I watched in awe as upwards of 30,000 radar plots appeared on the X11 GUI I had developed, and nothing crashed :-)

These days I'm very much into Apple iOS development - who would have thought it, a Unix box in your pocket? And not just a Unix box - a camera, GPS, internet connection and music player! The potential of this kit is just immense, but even better, it's actually fun to program! I don't know why Objective-C has such bad press - a marriage of Smalltalk and C, to me it's the perfect expressive computer language - simple, elegant, pragmatic, powerful, dynamic.