Bruce Hoult

Summary

From the mid 80's until the early 90's I worked at a sucession of three companies in the finance/stockbroking/bond/forex industry. I did mathematical analysis of the value of related stocks, options and bonds, and implemented various analysis and database programs around this. I used PCs (primarily the Macintosh) to automatically talk to and integrate the information from superminis, the NZ stock exchange, and information services such as Reuters. From the mid 90's until late 2002 I worked as a freelance programmer and consultant. Assignments included working on patented technology for improving colour photograph reproduction on high end PostScript typesetters, 3D graphics and real-time video processing on SGI equipment for a TV station, numerous "active" backends for web sites (databases, shopping baskets, user-customizable looks etc), writing custom software for Mac and Windows (single platform, simultaneous multi-platform development, ports from one platform to another). From the late 90's I started moving towards Unix and Linux and the telecommunications industry. In 1997 I worked first on a Windows NT system allowing businesses to self-manage their CENTREX lines, and then on a Unix (Stratus FTX on fault tolerant hardware) system for billing of toll calls. In 1998 and 1999 I worked in the US (Bellevue, WA) on OSS software designed to meet telcos' interoperation obligations under the US Telecommunications Act of 1996. In 2000 I decided it was time to apply the skills and experience gained from consulting to a full-time position where I could make a difference to an entire team and I accepted a position at an e-commerce company in the US (Chicago, IL). After the .com bubble burst in early 2001 I returned to NZ and resumed freelance work before accepting positions at eServGlobal, Metservice, Innaworks, Mozilla, and Samsung Specialties: My biggest fascination is with discovering, designing, implementing, and using the optimum multi-layered stack of abstractions that lie between the client's business requirements and the raw machine instructions. Traditionally, many of these layers go by different names and use different tools and techniques, but in fact I believe they are best viewed as different manifestations of a single concept: the Programming Language.