Places I Worked In
I worked in many places, but only some of them have a been a great and forming experience.
Delphi (1984-1986)
Well, that’s old. Delphi was an Italian startup, in the Pisa area. Pisa saw the first computer science research lab in Italy, the first University, and even the first (and only) Italian mainframe development at the end of the 50s. (google for the barbaracina group, and for the Elea 9000 story).
In the 80s, the area had a great (missed) opportunity to become the italian silicon valley, thanks to the start of the european Esprit I program, that funded IT research in Europe. The Pisa area saw the birth of a dozen research lab, from different companies, and a few startup. Delphi was on of those, but with a special twist: the founders, professors in the Pisa university, had interesting contacts with the USA market. Delphi became the italian distributor of Sun Microsystem (yes, I worked on a Sun 1 workstation running Unix system III v7), and of Symbolics.
The company also participated to a knowlede representation Esprit project. Look at @@@ for more details on the company history.
Personally I did a number of things; being a startup, you happens to do lot of different things; my main job was Zlisp programming on the Symbolics within the research project, and since I was the only guy that read the complete documentation package for the machine, I did a bit of customer support too. I did also a bit a C programming (tcp-ip).
The big lesson: my training course on the Symbolics machine: “Hey guy, you see this big button were it is written Help ? Press it”.. That’s was all, and it was enough.
Olivetti DOR (1986-1988)
When Olivetti bought Acorn, in the 80s, it asked Herman Hauser, the founder of Acorn, to reorganise the Olivetti research. DOR (Olivetti Research Division) was born. For a short while, we believed to be able to work on real, serious things instead of our toy projects, like the EPOC (Experimental Personal Office Computer) a research office workstation based on the Arm processor.
It was not long, Herman Hauser gave up, the European money decreased, and the Pisa laboratory closed down.
In the meanwhile it was a great environment, where a number of fine people worked, people that are still great friends.
For the technical part, I was the technical leader of a nice research project, mixing up knowledge representation, data bases and natural language parsing. All in Prolog, that was a language in fashion at that time. A lot of fun to use, but a nightmare for professional use. Later I managed a couple more projects before leaving.
Ircam
If are in Computer Music, you know what Ircam is; if you don’t, take a look to www.ircam.fr.
In short, the biggest, most famous, better financed centre for computer music in the world.
After my experience in Pisa, I wanted an experience abroad, and I also looked for a job closer to music, my second love.
The technical experience was there, the human experience also, the music not really; after all, if you write software for music making or for a military application, you just do that, write software, you are not a musicians, and you are not a soldier.
I worked in a couple of great projects, the ISPW, the Ircam Signal Processing Workstation, a musical workstation based on the NeXT workstation, and jMax, that i’ll describe in the projects section of my site.
International environment, very high technical profiles, research and development at the state of the art. A lot of fun, right in the centre of Paris.
I arrived with a six month contract, I stayed almost nine years, and I still live in Paris.
Mandrakesoft
I arrived in Mandrakesoft just after RedHat became a public company. Mandrakesoft got a lot of investor money, and went up from 22 to 160 people in two years, and then realized that that size was not sustainable; I left before the quite shocking downsizing; the company anyway happily survived and after a merge with Connectiva is called today Mandriva.
A couple of crazy years; never being in a place more interesting and stimulating; never being in a company as badly managed, and with such peculiar people inside; a place where to build long standing professional and personal relationships, and where to learn many things.
I did many things, mostly stopped after a while by the management (four major change in top management and strategy in two years); you find a couple of projects I set up in the projects section of this site.
DGI (now DGFIP)
In a European country, if you are a computer professional at a given moment you have to stop doing things, writing code and running projects, and start to tell people what to do; either as a manger (but the people that tried know how a bad manager I can be) or as an expert.
This is what I do today: I work as architect and expert in software engineering group of the french Tax agency, within the Copernic project, a huge rewrite of the agency IT system as an SOA system; I assure the technical coordination of the software engineering group activities.
The fun part: almost the whole agency IT system is being built with free software bricks: Linux, Jboss, Apache and the like. The software factory is based on gForge, Eclipse and maven. Yes, the Java virtual machine is not yet the free one, and we are still based on a commercial data base.
Big change, and sigh, I don’t write code any more; at least, i am not payed anymore to write software :->
European Commission
On a side, like a few other hundreds of european computer professionals I work as an expert for the European Commission; external experts are used for evaluating research project proposals and for reviewing their execution. I started on free software related projects, but I also cope with SOA related projects, networked enterprise and digital business ecosystems.
The People
If you are curious about the people I met in all these different places, the easiest thing is to take a look to my contacts in my linkedin page. By the way, do not invite me to other professional communities, to keep things simple, at least for the moment i’ll stick to linkedin.