My professional life is given my Linked In page. I was interesting in embedded systems and compilers and languages. I couldn’t decide on Computing or Linguistics as a first degree. I chose Computing for Real-time Systems at Bristol Polytechnic, later University of the West of England. I was extremely lucky to spend 6 months at CERN, Geneva, where I found a love for French. The rest is, sadly, not history. For my career I had a string of jobs, ending up in Hamburg. I love German as well.
My wife was Japanese and we went to Tokyo for the in-laws. I stayed too long, but I learned to read Japanese and eventually hold a conversation. I love Japanese. I studied calligraphy, with a brush, in Tokyo. I still try, even though I live in London and I don’t have a teacher. I studied Buddhism in Tokyo and I was lucky to meet a group in London. They have a Facebook group, Myokanko UK. I think Buddhism is very much like quantum physics. Both are hard to understand and non-intuitive. Buddhists say all things have Buddha-nature. Quantum physicists say all matter is capable of computation. I think these statements are equivalent.
I took a long break from my career and started again in 2016. It was a long catch-up on modern C++. AI became a thing again. Python has all the syntactic sugar I’ll ever need. Lack of guidance and I chose a C#/WPF project. I should have done it in Qt. Robert Martin, in a You Tube video, insists Functional programming is the future. We struggled in the second half of the 90’s to learn good OOD. I learned Scheme. Uncle Bob say Clojure, both are variants on Lisp.
This has become a list of TO DOs – living in France, Qt, functional programming and AI.