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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

You can learn more about me here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.