About me

I’m a software developer based in Northern California. I work on private and contracted software projects and am available for contract software development. Most of my commercial experience has been in electronic design automation (EDA); In the past, I’ve worked both in a large semiconductor and electronics company and in small EDA startups, but now my main focus is on iOS apps.

History

In January 2005, I set up Neon Design Technology, Inc. to help introduce a “new eon” of software tools for design. I quickly became enamored with Objective-C and began investigating bridging tools and higher-level languages that could be used with Objective-C to build powerful but easy-to-maintain software.

In 2007, I created and released an open-source programming language called Nu. Nu resolved many problems that I had found with bridges between Objective-C and existing scripting languages and added an additional benefit: as a Lisp, Nu brought the power of macros and s-expressions to Objective-C. With Nu, we can mix very high-level abstractions with tightly-optimized C code.

In 2008, Apple opened the SDK for the iPhone platform and I quickly shifted from electronic design tools to mobile applications. My first project was a casual puzzle game called Masyu that not-coincidentally could be solved with boolean satisfiability techniques (an area studied by my graduate school office mate) and later in the year I began work on a networked social game called gpsAssassin. Also, in March 2008 I founded the Silicon Valley iPhone Developer’s Meetup Group which I continue to organize.

2009 saw more iPhone projects: I built an enterprise application with a local startup that has now launched as MobileIron, helped complete and release gpsAssassin, began working with ZipRealty to create the ZipRealty for iPhone app, and in my spare time, developed a service-driven application called Townie.

In 2010, I continued working with MobileIron and ZipRealty, adding an augmented reality feature to the ZipRealty iPhone app, working with MobileIron to build the user interface for the MobileIron Sentry iPad app, and helping to design and then build ZipRealty for iPad. Also, in the spring I organized a team at the iOS Dev Camp that won the "Coolest App" award with our app called "iPad Slot Machine". It was a distributed app that used four iPads and an iPod to build a virtual slot machine. Later, several of us worked together to design and build a video app for a large European communications company (currently unannounced). That and my continued focus on mobile apps prompted me to rename my company Radtastical, Inc., a name that was partly motivated by this Twitter post.

What is neontology?

I chose to use neontology.com as the domain for this blog because it has some interesting connotations:

• Neos is a Greek word meaning “new”. It is the root of the English prefix neo-, which also means “new”.
• In philosophy, ontology is the discussion of “being”, basically considering the question of what it means to say that something exists. In computer science, an ontology is a structured collection of knowledge about objects and the relationships among them. In a sense, you could consider it a very ambitious database. In practice, it’s so difficult that it can only be done in specific domains, such as genetics or wine. But lately, it’s become a popular term among people who anticipate a semantic web.
• In biology, neontology is the study of currently living organisms. This is in contrast to paleontology, the study of fossils and extinct organisms. In this sense, neontology is the study of those who have successfully evolved.

But what’s in a name? Have you learned something new today?

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world which no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition