How did you get interested in that?

Interested in neuroscience, visualization, typography, reproducibility or Emacs? For Neuroscience, I think it dates back to my PhD in 2000 where I designed artificial neural networks largely inspired by the structure of the brain. For visualization and typography, I’m not sure how it started. Probably 15 to 20 years ago when I was designing figures for my scientific articles and started to read on the topic. For reproducibility, it started exactly in 2015 when I failed at re-using a published model whose author was in the same lab as me. After receiving many feedbacks from the community following a comment I published, I decide to create the journal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Software development has always been an interest for me since I was young; I really enjoyed the whole problem-solving aspect of it. As a bonus, it turns out you can earn a decent living from it too! Even outside of actual work I’m always doing some kind of programming-related side project and I love trying out new technologies, programming languages or frameworks.

Blogging is a thing I’ve been doing for a long while, even before I started working. I love blogging and think more people should be doing it. Preferably not for profit or marketing or other commercial purposes; there are many benefits to having a body of work online that you can reference and point people to.

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.

My first professional role was creating an app for a startup, before I moved into freelancing working with other people and then later on becoming a soloist.

When COVID forced the world into lockdown, and unfortunately some of my clients as well, this was my best chance to start creating products of my own with the tips and tricks i’ve learnt over the years.

I’ve really enjoyed the journey so far, although some days can be quite challenging, but i’m always strongly driven to learn new things so I can create even better apps.

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.

I went looking for software that integrated the different phases of writing a manuscript-length text - the outlining, the research, the writing, the restructuring - but found nothing that quite did what I wanted. So I figured, “Hey, I’ve dabbled in HTML, why not teach myself to code and write my own app?” So I wrote and sketched out a long design document, and that’s what I did. You might say it was the ultimate procrastination project: I decided I needed to build my own writing tool before I could finish my writing.

Assuming you mean programming - through video games! Like many children I got drawn to computers to be able to play more games and to programming to be able to make games. The full story of how I became a programmer is will be a small novel, so I’ll leave it at 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.

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.

When the iPhone SDK launched, I was encouraged by the idea that I could build and ship something to thousands of people worldwide. My passion for web design quickly translated to app design.

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.

Album shuffle wasn’t ever part of the built-in iOS Music app, and after kicking around the idea for a while, a few years ago I decided to learn iOS development with the goal of writing a utility app to shuffle albums. I launched version 1.0 of Albums in August of 2019, and over the last several years (including a year where I focused on it full-time), it has grown into what I like to think of as a “music relationship manager.” I use it to listen to, keep track of, and discover music.

I got into the data engineering side of things totally by accident. I started volunteering with the Philadelphia Bail Fund toward the end of 2019, helping them with tech support. That grew into a project to onboard them to a CRM, which meant cleaning up their existing operational data. I’d fooled around with Python and Pandas in the past for a previous job, and in doing that project I saw how transformative it could be to work with data in code. I learned that it scratches a particular itch for me to dig into a messy database and clean it up, so I’ve been honing those skills and working with other mission-driven organizations ever since.

My father is a freelance graphics designer (now retired), so computers (Apple ones at least) have been around the household for a long time (since 1993 or so). This got me interested in the computer world in the first place. Initially, I was quite happy just digging around the system and peeking around with ResEdit (ha! Who remembers this gem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit). As I dug more and more into the system, I got more and more interested in creating something as well.

At first, I got to play around with Pascal, then REALbasic (now Xojo), and finally, at the age of 17 or so, I got to learn Objective-C. I actually had my first shareware apps out on the Internet when I was 15 or so and I sold license codes via Kagi which was an e-commerce platform back in the day and I remember getting the first check and being so excited about this.

Reading this back and seeing all the now-defunct services and apps, kind of makes one feel a bit old 😬

Until a couple years ago, “Anamorphic” and “Budget” were a paradox, putting those two words in the same sentence was like saying “dry water”. Anamorphics have been historically expensive, with lenses that you literally can’t buy (Panavision), to more affordable models that cost only thirty thousand dollars. So approaching the subject with the goal of spending under a thousand bucks was a big challenge.

The journey involved a lot of trial and error, and dealing with anamorphic adapters, which are not full lenses, but can be set up in such a way that you get most of the good things from anamorphic lenses, with the cost of dealing with lots of inconveniences. What got me hooked was how special the images came out when using these strange adapters at the time. The year was 2012 and digital video was starting to pick up in the low-budget market with many Canon cameras making that transition (5D and 7D were the key models). The main issue is everyone was using absolutely the same gear, so the results came out looking all sort of similar, even though the stories being told were completely different. I wanted something to make the look stick out among the crowd and anamorphics were my ticket.

In my last year of film school I made my graduation project to shoot a short film using affordable setups and write about the production process: what limitations the gear brought about, how that influenced my visual choices, the amount of experimentation needed before going into filming, and everything in between those steps. From there, the last ten years were a whirlwind and I never really stopped researching and writing/talking about the subject.

Being a human, and to err like one, came naturally. Travelling was a bug from my parents who were lucky enough to show us the world as kids. Most of my childhood was spent in Singapore, because my dad was a business traveller.

I have a connection with old computers; maybe it’s because they could still be interrogated and comprehended by laypeople with multimeters and oscilloscopes! You ask about anime later, so I’ll respond there. Coffee is my elixir of life, and a fascinating hobby to explore in its own right.

I’ve always loved technical and non-fiction writing; my favourite books as a kid were the school’s encyclopedia. There’s an art and science to distilling data and presenting information in an accurate, relatable form people can understand. Most technical docs and online discussion forums (mostly) satisfy the former but fail the latter, which is more obvious the more you read.

Solution architecture came up entirely by accident. I found myself being pulled into more sales meetings to offer advice and guidance, on account of being able to talk as easily with clients as the engineers. It was a perfect example of dressing for the job you want not what you have: it might not have started had I not been wearing a collared shirt one that day.

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.

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.

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

Starting with the topic of my university studies — European affairs — I did not actually have a prior interest in it. As a teenager, my mind was in football (soccer) and extracurricular activities. I did not like school. The reason I picked that field for my studies is because it involved foreign languages. I thought that was cool.

I became a philosopher gradually, as I kept reflecting on both the theoretical aspects of my studies and the quotidian events I was exposed to. Since my early teenage years, I have been a keen student of the human condition. I have seen how people behave in different circumstances and have a good way of reading individuals. Philosophy was the culmination of years of thinking about what we are doing in our lives and why. It also is what emancipated me from falsehoods that are perpetuated through my culture in the form of social expectations.

My interest in technology developed relatively late in my life. The first computer I bought was in 2018: it was a Lenovo ThinkPad X220. While the first laptop I ever owned was a hand-me-down Macbook I got at work in late 2012 or early 2013 — I am not sure anymore. Up until the early 2010s I did not know anything about computers. Not even common keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab. I remember that being a revelation! I still am bad at typing as I cannot touch type and cannot keep my hands on the home row: they hover above the keyboard, while I mostly use just the index on the left hand… At any rate, I switched to using free software in 2016 out of a desire to break free from the increasingly constraining corporate control I was under. First using the Macbook and then, when that broke, moving to the ThinkPad. For me this was always about freedom: I did not know the technicalities.

Through daily use of GNU/Linux and its individual utilities, I learnt more about software and computers in general. I eventually configured my bespoke setup that involved a tiling window manager (BSPWM is its name), Tmux, Vim, XTerm, Mutt, Newsboat, and others. Basically, I was living in the terminal and was handling my files with core programs like ‘cd’, ‘cp’, ‘mv’, and related.

My experience with those tools made me realise the limitation of the Unix paradigm: the lack of an integrated layer of interactivity. I was not happy that I could not configure all my programs in a uniform fashion. Vim uses Vimscript, Ranger is done in Python, the window manager expects shell scripting… Each of those is excellent in its own right, but the gestalt form is awkward. The missing layer of interactivity is apparent in wider workflows but also in little things like setting a theme: it is not trivial to make all those programs sing in concert.

As such, I switched to Emacs in the summer of 2019. There I found what I considered the missing piece of an otherwise nice Unix-y system. I have been using Emacs ever since and have also learnt how to program a few things. I did so by tinkering with Emacs until I could eventually write fully fledged programs in Emacs Lisp.

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.

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.

I think many young people find their way into writing software through web development because there’s a low barrier to entry - most of the tools are free. But since I learned how to program before residential internet took off, my only option was building simple games and programs for DOS and Windows.

And while I love using and building apps for iOS, I think that early learning experience cemented my love of desktop software more than anything else. When I bought my first Mac in college, I immediately wanted to write software for it. So I dove in, learned the platform, and never looked back - even when the iPhone came out five years later, and mobile apps started to take over the world, my love for designing and building desktop software has remained.

I like to joke that I make all my money writing iOS apps during the day to pay for my hobby of writing Mac apps at night.

I was in line at my local AT&T store on day one to buy an original iPhone. It was the piece of technology I was most excited about owning as a teenager, and I couldn’t wait to make things for it. Shortly after the iPhoneOS SDK was released, I teamed up with my high school classmate Brian Capps and started learning how to build apps, and we still run the company together today, nearly 15 years later. In college, my roommate Andrew Harrison joined us as a business partner, and since then we’ve grown to a team of 11 people across 5 states.

The Internet stuff I sort of fell in to. If you were on a uni campus in the early 1990s, you started to have some access to the Internet. And if you had some access, you quickly worked out that this Internet thing was going to take over the world. But most of the tools were only available for Unix systems, so I made it my mission to build tools for the Mac to merge Mac ease-of-use and Unix Internet tools. For Keyboard Maestro, I used and relied on it myself, and it had been stuck in a kind of developer limbo for some years, so eventually I asked Michael Kamprath what his plans were, and he was not at a point where he could move it forward. So a deal was struct and I took it on.