Syntopikon

Peter Lewis

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Peter N Lewis. I include the N (for Neil) because I once worked out there are around 10,000 folks named Peter Lewis in the world (no idea if that is correct though), and several of them are quite famous. That said, I once walked in to a Mac tech store in Austin, TX and had someone recognise my name on my credit card and tell me that was “quite a famous name in this industry” (back in the early Internet days when I was relatively well known). I live in Perth, Western Australia, where I’ve been since I was 13 - before that I lived in Canada and I was born in Jamaica. I’ve got a fantastic wife and three kids, the youngest near the end of high school and the other two in uni. I’ve been writing and releasing Mac software for thirty years. I wrote a lot of early Mac Internet software, including Interarchy, and being part of what eventually became the system that maps URL schemes (like “http”) to applications. About twenty years ago I purchased Keyboard Maestro back when it was version 1, and my main focus since then has been building it into a very powerful automation tool.

Matthew Bischoff

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Matthew Bischoff, but I often go by just mb. I do a lot of things, but I’m best known for starting and running Lickability, a software studio that designs and develops apps for companies like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Houseparty, Mastodon, and many more. I also make a podcast with my friend Syd called Absolutely Crushed, where we interview interesting people about their celebrity crushes.

Tyler Hall

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a software developer from Nashville. And while I still do web development occasionally, my focus (and love!) for the last seventeen years has been building products for Apple’s platforms - especially macOS.

How did you get interested in that?

My father was a high school English teacher in the 1980s. And part of his job was teaching the school’s typing class. Back then, the curriculum also taught students a few weeks’ worth of BASIC programming lessons. So when we bought our first family computer in 1992, he showed me a few simple commands, and I immediately fell in love with programming.

Ben Street

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m an art historian based in London. I teach, lecture, and write about art, usually the art of our time.

How did you get interested in that?

I began by making art myself, then transitioned into reading about it, then writing about it, and I’m trying to get back to making it now. I’ve been working in this field for over two decades, and I’ve not much to show for it, but it’s an enjoyable life. I can’t believe I get to do it.

Ian Feiggen

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

G’day, I’m Ian Fieggen, better known as “Professor Shoelace”. I’ve spent the past couple of decades compiling an unexpectedly large amount of information about shoelaces – particularly how to lace them and tie them – and presenting it in an informative and hopefully entertaining manner via various means, including printed handouts, bulletin boards, my website, book, videos, social media and smartphone apps.

What software, hardware, and other gear do you use?

As someone who literally lives on a shoestring, I rely on a bunch of old tools that still do the job. I only recently retired my 20-year-old PC that was running Windows XP, upgrading to a 10-year-old PC running Windows 8 (which I inherited from my Dad). This allows me to continue running most of my old graphics software, such as an ancient copy of Adobe Suite (circa 2000) that cost me well over a thousand bucks. I think I’ve just about got my money’s worth out of that investment!

Protesilaos Stavrou

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Protesilaos. Some friends, especially English-speaking ones, call me “Prot”. You are welcome to do the same.

I do a variety of things, most of which are reflected on my website. I write/talk about philosophy, Emacs and free software, politics, and related issues. If I am to summarise all this in one word, that is “tinkerer”. I proceed through trial and error.

How did you get interested in that?

All of my current interests emerged organically through everyday life experiences and/or coincidences.

Shawn Hickman

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Shawn Hickman and I’m a designer/developer who makes the app Sofa. Sofa is an iOS app that helps you be more intentional with your downtime. You do this by creating lists of books, movies, tv shows, games and more that you want to enjoy later.

How did you get interested in that?

I’ve always been on the nerdier side, but I distinctly remember when the original iPhone was announced. I remember saying “I want to do that!” without having any idea what “that” was. I was overwhelmed with excitement about it. Since then it’s been a winding path to where I am today.

Jay Hoffmann

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Jay Hoffmann and I’m the creator of a newsletter called The History of the Web which pairs posts and segments about the web’s history with an ongoing timeline, a project I’ve been running for around five years now. I’m also Director of Web Development at Reaktiv, a WordPress agency that works in enterprise and higher-ed.

How did you get interested in that?

Web development and history have been two interests of mine for a very long time. I had a computer relatively early, and was on there building websites even in high school. So it’s something that I’ve really always had my eye on, and being able to participate and contribute to writing its history has been such a great opportunity for me. That’s kind of what it’s all been about for me, just in some small way doing my part.

Ruben Schade

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I ask myself that every day! I’m a human, traveller, retro computer enthusiast, otaku, coffee aficionado, and verbose list enumerator who’s more than a little intimidated at being interviewed on the same site as some extraordinarily talented and interesting people.

Professionally I’m a technical writer and solution architect at an independent cloud infrastructure provider in Australia and the US. The former involves producing tenders, documentation, handover briefs, and validating technical copy for the sales and marketing teams. The latter is a fancy term for sitting on sales calls, asking questions, and translating vague requirements into a codified spec that our other engineers can implement.

Tito Ferradans

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Tito Ferradans. Born in Brazil, I live in Canada and I do a multitude of things.

I’m a college professor, a motion graphics artist, a cinematographer, but the most likely way you’ve heard of me is because of my YouTube channel “Anamorphic Cookbook”, where I talk almost exclusively about anamorphic lenses. I discuss how they work, their effects on the picture, the effects on the audience and how they changed cinema forever in the 1950’s. Anamorphics created the widescreen format and allowed filmmakers to fill up giant screens in movie theaters which, in turn, filled the theater seats with audiences craving for immersion.

Charlie Monroe

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a person who graduated from a college (software engineering masters degree) and decided not to contribute to someone else’s dream, but rather to build my own one. So I started my own software company, built a few apps (and acquired a few along the way), focusing on communicating with the customers myself. To me, it’s always frustrating getting support from someone who has learned a few phrases, but has no idea about how everything works. This is why to this day, I like to answer my customers’ support queries myself instead of hiring someone.

Adam Linder

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Adam Linder, and I am an app developer, data engineer, and all-around computer person based in Philadelphia PA. My day job is at a small start-up focused on helping non-profits think about, clean up, and operationalize their data. I am also the developer of Albums, an album-focused Apple Music client for iOS and iPadOS.

How did you get interested in that?

I only really started learning to code 3 or 4 years ago, at the tail end of my 20s, but I’ve been sitting in front of a computer for pretty much my whole life. More specifically, I’ve been sitting in front of a computer and listening to music for pretty much my whole life. You could define eras in my life by the hardware and software I used to listen to music. There was the era of Winamp and the Creative Zen Nomad, then of iTunes and the iPod. I fell in love with a feature of the iPod called album shuffle — playing one full random album, then another one, and so on, and it became my default way of listening to music.

Mickey Peterson

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Mickey Petersen. I live in London, UK.

I’m a professional software developer, and I have been programming since I was around 10 years old. I did not have friends or family who knew much about computing, so I had to learn everything myself, from scratch.

How did you get interested in that in the first place?

I cut my teeth programming C in Turbo C for DOS and moved on to Delphi for Windows some years later, whilst at the same time trying to get a grip on this fairly new-fangled thing called Linux. Back then you had to go through all manner of hoops to even get it: I think I got mine from a CD that a friend of a family member had. It would’ve been far too large for my meagre 33.6k dialup modem connection to even attempt to download it from the web.

Vidit Bhargava

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Vidit Bhargava, I am the co-founder at Squircle Apps, we build applications for Apple Platforms. I take care of the design and development side of things.

How did you get interested in that?

I started designing when I was in school. I designed and maintained an e-magazine for students to keep abreast with technology news and to catch up on trivia, and I took part in several inter-school web designing competitions which honed my web design skills.

Russ Shanahan

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Russ Shanahan, an independent app developer. I build Happy Scale, which helps people reach their health goals by helping them peacefully monitor their weight trends.

How did you get interested in that?

I’ve been interested in my relationship with obesity my whole life. I love thinking about the ways I can help myself reach and sustain a healthy weight.

Check out my app “Happy Scale” on the iOS App Store. I’m sorry to say it is not currently available for Android phones.

Bozhidar Batsov

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Bozhidar and I love computers in general and programming in particular. My fanatic devotion to Emacs is known world-wide. I spend a lot of my (free) time on GitHub, contributing to various open-source Ruby, Clojure and Emacs Lisp projects. My most notable open-source projects are RuboCop (a linter/formatter for Ruby) and CIDER (a Clojure IDE for Emacs).

I’m a constant learner when it comes to programming and I love playing with new programming languages - right now I’m learning OCaml.

Keith Blount

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Keith Blount, the founder, director and lead developer of Literature & Latte. We build apps for writers, the most well-known being Scrivener.

How did you get interested in that?

I’ve always been interested in writing, and I’ve always been interested in computers, despite my humanities background. When I was working on long texts some time ago - an MA dissertation, then an unfinished PhD thesis and an unfinished novel - I found existing writing software cumbersome. Most of it was based on the idea that you start at page one and write until you’re finished, whereas my writing process wasn’t so sequential, and involved chapters or sections in different files, index cards with synopses that got moved around, and hand-written or spreadsheet-based outlines.

Michael Tigas

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hey i’m Michael! I live in Melbourne, Australia and have been creating apps since 2014.

Most of this time i’ve worked as a freelancer, helping clients create apps for their business, but recently moved into the indie space in 2020 - and haven’t looked back since!

How did you get interested in that?

Thankfully I discovered my joy for creating apps in my final year of university, as I was quite lost with what I actually wanted to do.

Roy Tang

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Roy Tang. Professionally I’m a freelance software developer, but I’m on a bit of a work hiatus now and am in a bit of a “wandering around and trying out things” phase. I write a blog on my personal site at https://roytang.net/blog/. Some of the things I’ve been trying out over the past few years are sketching, game development, and streaming on Twitch

Marijn van Hoorn

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Marijn van Hoorn, and i’m a student based in the north east of England who happens to maintain a personal website by the name of The Satyrs’ Forest in their free time.

How did you get interested in that?

I’m a member of the internet generation — my mum and dad met on IRC chat; the latter set up a curated list of bookmarks to introduce me to the world wide web in my childhood. I suppose my infatuation with internet sightseeing and personal sites began there. Sometime around 2017, i happened upon the free web host–cum–community Neocities, and figured i’d set up shop after burning all my social media accounts. The rest is history.

Wouter Groeneveld

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Wouter and I currently study creativity for problem solving in software engineering education. I also like baking bread and thinking about thinking, which I call brain baking.

How did you get interested in that?

By following my gut! Before stumbling into academia, I was a software engineer myself for more than a decade. The more junior (and senior!) applicants we interviewed, the more I was convinced that when it comes to programming, we value the wrong skills. It’s never the technicalities that causes all sorts of trouble, but the non-technical ones: communication, solution-oriented thinking, creativity, … The more I pondered that, the more I got interested in doing something about it. By then, I was also part-time teaching at the local faculty of engineering technology. I decided to thoroughly investigate what I thought was wrong with industry and education. Four years later, I’m nearly finishing my PhD on the topic.

Quentin Zervaas

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Quentin Zervaas, an independent app developer. I make several apps, including Streaks, which won an Apple Design Award in 2016. Streaks is an app for forming habits, which encourages you to complete your tasks on a daily basis.

How did you get interested in that?

I’ve always been into computers and programming them. When the Internet started to get popular in the 90s, I learned web development and did that for many years. When the iPhone came along, I started building apps. I published my first app in 2010.

Marcos Tanaka

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, I’m Marcos Tanaka! I do a bunch of apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, including MusicHarbor, MusicSmart, Play, and MusicBox.

How did you get interested in that?

I’ve always been interested in tech and in creating things, which is what I think led me to study software development. I love developing tools and apps that improve how I do a particular task or fix a problem I have. And since I use Apple platforms, it was natural to start exploring how to develop apps for these devices.

Marc Barrowclift

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Marc Barrowclift, and I work full time on helping maintain the DVR Scheduler at Comcast. Nowadays, in my free time I’m typically either writing articles on my blog or recording a new episode for my podcast, Bad Music Hertz.

How did you get interested in that?

Funnily enough, the blog began seven years ago as a means to an end; my primary interest at the time was (and in many ways remains) web development & interface design, and I was desperate to create a place where I could learn and practice it. However, I was initially intimidated by the deeper knowledge required for building dynamic web apps, so the path of least resistance was taken in the form of a static personal website. The simple static website framework I went with (Jekyll) just so happened to also bring along with it rudimentary plain text blogging support. Since I was interested in playing around with article designs, I decided to commit to writing a few articles to populate the space. It was through the process of writing those “placeholder” articles that I discovered I was quite fond of it and took more of an active interest in finding more things to write about.

Nicolas Rougier

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Nicolas P. Rougier and I’m a director of research at Inria which is the National Research Institute for Research in Computer Science and Mathematics. My research is in the domain of computational neuroscience, mostly designing brain models to explain decision making and behaviour. My background is in computer science and mathematics and this is one of the reason that I’m also interested in scientific visualization. I’ve authored many resources on that topic, the latest being an open access book on scientific visualization using Python and Matplotlib (see https://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/scientific-visualization.html). I’m also interested in reproducible science and I’ve authored books and papers and co-founded the ReScience C and the ReScience X journals. Finally, when I’ve some spare time, I hacks Emacs.

Stephen Floyd

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a native Texan who ventured to New England for college and never quite made it back. Instead I took a two-decade detour to NYC where I began an investment banking career, got married, had kids and earned a pilot’s license. But I did eventually convince my wife to move as far south as Virginia. My professional career is focused on advising corporate clients on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What It Is

Syntopikon is a collection of conversations with cool people who do cool things. Software, art, writing, music – whatever it is, I’m interested in it. I’ve interviewed people whose books I’ve enjoyed, whose reviews I’ve enjoyed, whose blogs I’ve enjoyed, whose writing I’ve enjoyed, whose apps I use (and enjoy using), and more. As a maker myself, I’m interested in how people get their work done, why they do the work they do, and how they might work the same (or differently) from other people in their lanes.

Syntopikon

Peter Lewis

Who are you, and what do you do?

Matthew Bischoff

Who are you, and what do you do?

Tyler Hall

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Ben Street

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Ian Feiggen

Who are you, and what do you do?

What software, hardware, and other gear do you use?

Protesilaos Stavrou

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Shawn Hickman

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Jay Hoffmann

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Ruben Schade

Who are you, and what do you do?

Tito Ferradans

Who are you, and what do you do?

Charlie Monroe

Who are you, and what do you do?

Adam Linder

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Mickey Peterson

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that in the first place?

Vidit Bhargava

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Russ Shanahan

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

What resources would you recommend for people interested in what you do?

Bozhidar Batsov

Who are you, and what do you do?

Keith Blount

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Michael Tigas

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Roy Tang

Who are you, and what do you do?

Marijn van Hoorn

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Wouter Groeneveld

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Quentin Zervaas

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Marcos Tanaka

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Marc Barrowclift

Who are you, and what do you do?

How did you get interested in that?

Nicolas Rougier

Who are you, and what do you do?

Stephen Floyd

Who are you, and what do you do?

About

What It Is