More About Me
I was born in 1963, and grew up on Vancouver Island, where two inches of rain is considered a light shower. I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Engineering at Queen’s University in 1984, then worked in Ottawa for a year and a half before moving to Edinburgh to do an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence, which I completed in 1986.
I spent the next six years working as a programmer in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre; my responsibilities included parallelizing scientific applications, editing the centre’s newsletter, and running its summer intern program. I also worked on a Ph.D. in Computer Science, which I completed in 1992, and started writing for the popular press. These experiences have shaped my career and research interests ever since.
Between 1992 and 1995, I wrote a book called Practical Parallel Programming while doing post-doctoral work at the University of Oregon, the University of Alberta, Australian National University, the Vrije Universiteit, and the University of Toronto. In 1995, I took a post at IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto; fifteen months later, I joined a business data visualization startup, where I experienced first-hand many of the things that can go wrong in software development projects.
I left that company in 1998 to become an independent contractor, working primarily for Los Alamos National Laboratory. I also wrote my first children’s book, Three Sensible Adventures. Between 2000 and 2004, I was lucky enough to be part of the development team for an identity management and access control product called Select Access. Originally a startup, the team was acquired by Baltimore Technologies, and then by Hewlett-Packard. I also became a contributing editor with Doctor Dobb’s Journal during this time, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I supervised undergraduate programming projects, and created a new second-year course on software tools and design.
After leaving HP in 2004, I developed an open source course on software development for scientists and engineers, wrote another book called Data Crunching, and taught several other courses at the University of Toronto. I became an assistant professor in Computer Science in May 2007. Since then I have published another children’s book (Bottle of Light) and another programming book (Practical Programming), supervised several MSc theses, run some cross-country undergraduate capstone projects, and helped create a new M.Sc. in Applied Computing.
More importantly, on March 31, 2007, my wife Sadie Lewis and I became the proud and happy parents of Madeleine Erica Wilson, the most wonderful little redhead in the whole wide world. Sadie and I got married in Victoria, B.C., on August 19, 2008.
