Linus Torvalds

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 4th, 2024

The tech industry is a fertile ground for anecdotes starred by individuals qualifying as brilliant jerks, psychopaths, and other atrocious types of personality. Suffice to say that, from the height of their positions of supposed leadership, many chose the easy path of advancing a twisted agenda that feeds into their hubris, in the detriment of the wider advancement of society.

Niklaus Wirth

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, February 5th, 2024

It is challenging to summarize the influence of Niklaus Wirth in the daily lives of otherwise unsuspecting programmers worldwide. The more one digs into videos, papers, books, and obituaries, the more information surfaces and fights for a place in the spotlight. There are, however, at least two major guidelines that drove his passion for software. One was simplicity through clear understanding and lack of ambiguity; the other, closely related to the first, was teaching.

Stewart Cheifet

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 1st, 2024

The same way kids are addicted to TikTok nowadays, I was addicted to TV as a kid. In the place and time of my teenage years, that is Argentina during the 1980s, it was the times of hyperinflation and eternal crisis (which begs the question: has anything changed in forty years?) Such a tense situation also meant that there was not much content on the telly about a subject that I was definitely interested in since a young age: computers. I mean, you could barely afford food, so, understandably enough, computing was scarce. Maslow's pyramid, yadda yadda.

Margaret Hamilton

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, December 4th, 2023

On Sunday, July 20th, 1969, at precisely 20:14:19 UTC, just a mere three minutes before touchdown, the voice of Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. confirmed the "Go for landing" order received from Mission Control together with a phrase nobody wanted to hear at that moment: "Program alarm - 1201."

Jim Henson

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 6th, 2023

There is so much content about IBM online that it became quite complicated to pick an entry for the Vidéothèque section this month. We are talking about a company with monthly marketing budgets bigger in absolute numbers than the average yearly payroll of a small or medium enterprise; and with more than 100 years of history, there are quite a few stories to be told about it.

Michael Stonebraker

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, October 2nd, 2023

Since the first Turing Award in 1966 (Alan J. Perlis) until the last one at the time of this writing (Robert Metcalfe), there have been four laureates related to database technology. First, Charles W. Bachman in 1973, for "his outstanding contributions to database technology." Then, Ted Codd in 1981, for "his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems." Third, Jim Gray in 1998 for "seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation." Finally, Michael Stonebraker in 2014, for "fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems."

Bertrand Russell

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, September 4th, 2023

Philosophy is a weird subject. Many of us have had to learn some of it in high school, but we quickly dismissed it as we move forward in life, only to rediscover it as soon as we hit some midlife crisis along the way. Or, at least, that was the experience of this author. Yet philosophy is the only real bridge uniting all sciences, and as such deserves a much brighter spot on it. In particular, the road that led us to the computer was primarily built by philosophers, and in particular, by Bertrand Russell, whose 1959 interview is the subject of this month's Vidéothèque article.

Dartmouth College

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, August 7th, 2023

In August 2014, Dartmouth College published a video commemorating the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language, the subject of this month's Vidéothèque section. It features original footage from the 1960s and interviews of former students and team members, including Professor Thomas Kurtz, who was 85 years old at the time. But the heart and soul of the video is, without any doubt, Professor John Kemeny himself; not only his technical contributions, which were outstanding by every standard, but also his open personality and progressive spirit.

Guy Kawasaki

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 3rd, 2023

There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.

Mayuko Inoue

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, June 5th, 2023

The archetype of software engineering dress code is quite parochial: a t-shirt (usually featuring a conference or programming language logo, or a geek joke), a pair of jeans, snickers, and a sweatshirt, in case the weather gets more San Francisco-like than you might expect. And that is it. Let us admit it: the "about us" page of software companies often looks like advertising for The Gap, American Apparel, or sometimes even, sadly, Abercrombie & Fitch, minus the abs, of course.