About Me
Dr. Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including Beautiful Code, Making Software, The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Teaching Tech Together, and most recently Software Design by Example in JavaScript and Software Design by Example in Python.
Greg is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT’s Influential Educator of the Year award, and currently works as a software engineering manager at Plotly.
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 before moving to Edinburgh to do a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence. I spent the next six years working at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre while doing a Ph.D. in Computer Science (which I completed in 1992) and writing popular science articles for The Independent and New Scientist.
Over the next few years I wrote and edited my first few books while doing post-doctoral work at several universities and working at IBM, a data visualization startup, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. I became involved in open source development, particularly Python, and started playing the saxophone and Ultimate frisbee (though not simultaneously). From 2000 to 2004 I was a contributing editor with Doctor Dobb’s Journal and part of a computer security startup that was eventually acquired by Hewlett-Packard. I also published my first children’s book and met the woman I’m married to, and in 2007 we became the happy parents of a wonderful troublemaker.
I was a professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto from 2007 to 2010, during which time I helped create a Master’s degree in Applied Computing, was named ComputerWorld Canada’s “IT Educator of the Year”, and published some more books (one of which, Beautiful Code, won a Jolt Award).
I left academia in 2010 and spent the next seven years building Software Carpentry into a worldwide volunteer organization that teaches basic computing skills to thousands of researchers every year. Somewhere in there I found time to edit a book on evidence-based software engineering and the first two volumes of The Architecture of Open Source Applications. After a stint at Rangle.io in 2017 I joined DataCamp, who I’m proud to say fired me in 2018.
More recently I developed an instructor training and certification program for RStudio (now Posit) and was briefly Head of Education for Metabase before working as a software engineering manager at Deep Genomics and now Plotly. In my free time I helped build TidyBlocks and Glosario and wrote or co-wrote Teaching Tech Together, JavaScript for Data Science, Research Software Engineering with Python, and a pair of books called Software Design by Example in JavaScript and Python. if you’d like to chat, please drop me a line.
CV (PDF, HTML)
Bibliography