About

I am a software developer and mobile designer with 15+ years of professional, academic, and volunteer service.

Brenton has a strong vision for where he wants to take his technology. In my experience, a vision like this is essential for success in breaking into new areas. This is in addition to all the other strengths such as technical knowledge and expertise that he has.

Name-checked on HN:

Brenton Bostick at Wolfram has done some truly first class work in closing this gap though.

School

My 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Fisher is one of the most important influences in my life. She introduced me to Logo and drawing with turtle graphics. She also introduced her classes to this thing called “the internet” where you could send messages to other classes around the world. Fascinating!

She also did her best to console me when I broke down in tears because I could not understand fractions.

“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” ― John von Neumann

Some time in middle school or high school, I found Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton that has simple rules but demonstrates very complex behavior. I still have the QBasic scripts I used to generate POV-Ray scenes. Even at a young age, I kind of understood that one program’s data is just another program’s code.

I decided to major in Computer Science in college. I also minored in Mathematics, Physics, and Computational Science (3 minors may be a school record). Dr. Noyes became my mentor and I tried to take as many CS and math classes as possible while also working various jobs.

One of the jobs I had was working on the school website. I was able to learn enough PHP to start my own website called wittbooks.com, where students were able to buy and sell books directly to each other and bypass the school bookstore. It was quite a success! Alas, I let it lapse once I left college, but it was a great learning experience about managing a website and a database from scratch.

For another college job, I was a research assistant at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) where I was tasked with updating the software that was used for teaching graph theory classes from Java AWT to the newer Swing framework.

Dr. Noyes introduced me to Mathematica, the programming language and computing environment from Wolfram Research, and it was eye opening. Mathematica is a language that has single commands for taking derivatives of mathematical functions, drawing plots of 3D models, etc. It was the most high-level programming language I had ever seen.

I took 2 independent studies: “Cellular Automata and Chaos” and “The Fast Fourier Transform”, which was in conjunction with the Physics department. Some of this work was transferred into presentations.

I was on the Dean’s list and I also received various awards and scholarships: Paul Hessler Award, Charles and Elsie Little Award, Alison Scholarship.

I applied and was accepted into the first NKS Summer School. It was a summer camp for computer geeks! It was great!

After working for a few years, I decided that I wanted to go and get my Master’s degree in Computer Science.

I attended Indiana University where I focused on Programming Languages and my Master’s thesis under Daniel Leivant was a survey of termination analysis methods titled “Simple Termination is Complicated”.

Teaching and Volunteering

Teaching has always been a passion of mine. In college, I tutored high school students in algebra through the Math Workshop. And I have always tried to help enthusiastic young people with questions about programming and math.

I have adjuncted for Antioch College and Wittenberg University.

Volunteering is important to me. I visited code.org and found local teachers interested in having professional software developers come and talk about what they do. I brought my Raspberry Pi and the kids loved it!