August 3, 1962 - November 4, 2000
My birth name was John, but as Wodehouse said, "Every Tom, Dick and Harry is called John", so I changed it to my initials, informally when I was an undergrad at Oxford, legally a few years ago in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. I'm a teacher by nature and profession; I have been teaching all my life. When I was in high-school, I tutored people in maths and english; when I was working on my degree in France I had a side-job teaching basic computer skills to business students, while at Brown working on my PhD in Artificial Intelligence I taught software engineers C++. Now I work for Semaphore and write and teach C++ courses, while looking at the software industry, trying to get a feel for what is good and what is not. "Teaching C++" includes a lot of general software engineering, and more and more human-computer interface notions.
Some pre-release versions of a few chapters from my intro to C++ for non-C programmers course:
Animation of the C++ transform algorithm
A postscript version of my CV.
I teach and consult for Semaphore Training; I helped write several of their early C++ courses, and recently have been rewriting the C++ curriculum. We have a 3-day course on the C++ Standard Template Library, a 5-day Introduction to C++ and OO Design using the Standard Library; I am currently working on a 5-day Advanced C++ course. I will probably also be teaching Java courses in the near future.
The most wonderful person in the world, our six-year old daughter,
Hayley.
A beautiful poem by Yeats: Tread softly
Glossary
of terms used in cyberspace
I liked Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works" very much, as I did his "The Language Instinct". Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain" was also excellent. I am always looking out for other good books on the functioning of the brain.