Growing up as a (software) engineer

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Abstract

In this talk I will discuss lessons I have learned over 40 years about how to grow as a programmer/engineer, and how to have a career without planning one. I hope to help you to ask the right questions so that you can understand better why you are doing the things you are, and explain that to others.

Do not expect this to be too serious (I used to wear a Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx badge on my badge-lanyard as a warning not to take me too seriously), and, I hope that we can achieve some interaction despite the online medium, so come with your questions.

About the speaker

Jim Cownie is currently an "Honorary Senior Research Fellow in High Performance Computing” at the University of Bristol. Since many of you are academics you’ll realise that means that no one is paying him! Prior to that he was Senior Principal Engineer with Intel, working on software (including OpenMP and its runtime), and trying to explain to hardware engineers that the way they think their design is used is likely wrong (at least for parallel HPC codes). Before that he worked on the TotalView debugger for ten years. In 1984 was one of the founders of Meiko, a British supercomputer company that lasted ten years and created interesting network hardware in the early 1990s. During that time he was a member of the initial MPI forum, and owner of the “Profiling” chapter in MPI-1. He started working at Inmos in 1979, where he wrote the microcode assembler for the first Transputers and parts of Inmos’ CAD system (both in BCPL). Jim has run Birds of a Feather sessions for OpenMP at both SC and ISC, as well as some for LLVM at SC, and is an ACM Distinguished Member.

Joining

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