During our morning standup this morning one of my colleagues pulled up the archive and dug up some of my source files from 40 years ago. He had been my colleague back then so I found some of his.
Great to hear you still making software! I assume because you still like it :)
Just out of curiosity, what kind of development are you doing at the moment? Can imagine after so many years it gets harder to find a challenging project.
There is no shortage of interesting code to write and I’m sure there always will be.
I was still working on symbolic AI but dropped it in 2021 in order to work on a more urgent problem, fighting climate change. So mostly it’s chemistry/engineering though there is also software to write.
Our standup was about building a test fixture for our lab.
What was the working/creative environment back at your PARC tour-of-duty?
The usual office politics or a special environment where everyone got along and collaborated?
Minimal politics, at least as far as I could tell, and lots of collaboration. Since PARC made its own tools there was a fair amount of cross-lab communication but really I just talked to other people in ISL (intelligent systems lab). I was just a kid.
The labs seemed to be renamed and organized from time to time so maybe there was politics I was too naive to see.
It was like google’s reputation 15-20 years ago: although Jeff ( my colleague today) and I didn’t work together we knew each other, also later knew each other from Stanford KSL/CSLI and later worked briefly together and work together today. I later worked for Doug Lenat at MCC (another research lab) whose office had been down hall from mine. And I still see other former PARC colleagues who are all over the Valley. So not an ivory tower.
