Lessons from a lifetime of doing, teaching, managing, and leading technical development
Friday, May 30
09:15 - 10:15
I graduated (MSEE) in 1980 in Bologna, where I was born and raised; I retired in 2023 in Sunnyvale (California), where I live now. In the 4+ decades in-between, I encountered interesting problems, succeeding on some of them, failing on others; along the way, I learned some valuable lessons (after all, failures teach more than successes do!) which may be of interest. They are not strictly technical, and so, not really obsolete: technology keeps progressing, but… human beings are stuck at release 1.0 beta, with no good prospects for upgrades, so it remains true that ““Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
Alex Martelli
Alex Martelli spent 8 years with IBM Research, 13 at think3, 4 as a consultant, and 18 at Google, retiring in 2023. He taught programming and numerical computing at Ferrara University and other venues. He’s a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, a winner of the Frank Willison Memorial Award for contributions to the Python community, and a top-page reputation hog on Stack Overflow. Books he’s authored or co-authored include two editions of the Python Cookbook, four of Python in a Nutshell, and a chapter in “Beautiful Teams”. Dozens of his tech talks at conferences, and interviews with him, are online, mostly on YouTube. Alex’s proudest achievement are two articles that appeared in Bridge World, more than 20 years ago, which were hailed as giant steps towards solving issues that had haunted bridge theoreticians for decades, and still get quoted in current bridge-theoretical literature.