everything else.Welcome Pieter
by Jorn van Dijk
Pieter de Bie is our new fulltime developer. He is going to focus on Versions. Time to introduce him properly.
Welcome at Sofa!
Q Let's get the basics out of the way. Who are you and what makes you tick?
A Hi, I'm Pieter, 24 years old and work at Sofa ;). I recently finished my Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen and just moved to Haarlem. I wrote a thesis on how computers can help in understanding how humans have acquired speech, which you can find here. It touches two subjects I find interesting: computer agents and language evolution.
Feel free to ask Pieter any question.
Q Where and when did you start programming?
A When I was 8 or so I created a program for our school's computers that allowed kids to test their maths skills. In high school I created a website in Perl that allowed the school to enter which teacher were absent that day, so that I didn't have to go to school for nothing. I have mostly taught myself everything I wanted to know, though I did follow classes in Java, C++ and Prolog in university. Nowadays I do most of my stuff in Objective-C or Ruby.
Q What's the biggest project you've worked on so far?
A My biggest project is GitX, a graphical interface for the git version control system. I mostly created it for myself, as all the existing interfaces looked really ugly on OS X (they are written in Tcl/Tk). I learned most of my Cocoa skills (which I use now at Sofa) from building GitX.
Q What will you be doing at Sofa?
A At first I'll be working on improving Versions, Sofa's interface for Subversion. Besides that I hope to pitch in with other projects, such as the secret Kaleidoscope project.
Q What programming projects do you find interesting?
A I follow some projects closely, though I do not contribute to them myself, like Redis and llvm. Redis is a very fast key-value storage that is also simple to use and install. LLVM is gaining more attention lately; Python will be using it as a JIT and MacRuby uses LLVM to JIT your code or even compile your Ruby/Cocoa application. I also stay up to date with Git and Subversion releases. I hope the Letters.app project will produce something nice.
Q What do you like to do next to programming?
A Most of my hobbies are fairly nerd-oriented things. I like to play with OpenStreetMap, adding restaurants, parks and hidden walkways to the map. I also like to go Geocaching, which can often be done at the same time. Other than that I like to go running or cycling when it's not too cold. With bad weather I like to watch my girlfriend play games on the PS3. I'm not much of gamer myself, but am very good in commenting on other people's playing style. I read a lot of the stuff that shows up on Hacker News.
Q How is your relation with Zowieso?
A Unfortunately my girlfriend is allergic to cats, so I try to stay away from him as much as possible.
Q Anything else?
A Nothing really. I'm excited about going to Cocoa conferences, which I've never been to before. I expect the people will be as nice as those at Sofa :).