|
| Nicole Hamilton. This was taken in December, 1999. Yes, I know I should post something more recent. |
Hamilton C shell began life in September, 1987 when I quit my job and set up shop in my living room near Boston, soon after the birth of my first child. Fifteen months and 35,000 lines of code later, it became the first multi-threaded application to ship on a PC. Today, it’s somewhere around 160,000 lines.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, I was the workstation software development manager at Prime Computer. And before that, I was at IBM in Austin, Texas, where I worked on a number of hardware and software design projects related to their early microprocessor-based word processing machines.
In 2002, the recession forced me to take a “real job” and for the next three years I worked (slaved) at Microsoft. In July 2003, I joined MSN Search as the 9th “dev” (Microspeak for developer) on the team building their new algorithmic search engine and wrote the query language (parser and compiler) and the dynamic ranker. My code defined how the users’ queries were interpreted (how we decided what they were searching for) and the order of results they got back. Overall, I wrote about 10% of the code in the first release. It was the hardest job of my life!
These days, I’m back to working full-time as an entrepreneur again, which definitely suits me better. I like working at my own pace and following my own dreams.
I hold a B.S. and M.S., electrical engineering, from Stanford University and an M.B.A. valedictorian from Boston University. My professional interests are in systems architecture and language processors. I love algorithms.
|
| My kids, when they were young. I remember my own mother once telling me, “You used to be such a good child.” |
I have two sons still living in Boston and a cat that lives with me. And okay, I’m kind of tomboyish. I have a motorcycle, I’ve crossed the Alps in a 540, had it up over 150 mph on the Autobahn and I’ve been to Talkeetna, Alaska. I’m also a firearms instructor and competitive shooter in everything from airpistols to high power rifle. My license plate says RKBA.
I love bicycling and hiking and being outdoors. A lot of my fashion needs seem to come from REI or the gift shop at a national park. I can cook pretty much anything and pretty much anything I cook can actually be eaten. I took flying lessons for a while but gave up just about the time I’d have solo’ed. I claimed it was just too expensive a hobby. It is, but that’s not why I quit.
|
| I swear, I really used a brush to do this. It wasn’t just fingers. Don’t ask, I have no idea what it is. |
I don’t care what anybody says, I still think Fight Club and Kissing Jessica Stein are really funny movies.
I used to claim that my one pet peeve was whatever hot new idea was currently promising to render the complex understandable to those who are just not very complex themselves. There was a time when I thought that was quite a hot new idea.
I also used to vow that should Hamilton Laboratories ever grow large enough to actually have a staff, its management will still never, ever ask anyone to write a weekly status report. Aw, come on. I’m lucky I’m not writing any just this moment.