(perpetually, of course)Best viewed with Netscape Navigator Gold 2.0, Mac OS 7.5, 800x600 resolution, 14.4K modem, and blink tags disabled
I was born in Tomsk, Russia, in 1984. I started to show an interest in math at an early age; I recall my dad explaining complex numbers to me when I was about 5 or so. Moved to Wellington, New Zealand in 1992. I was fascinated by the Macintosh LC in my dad's office: it had a black and white screen, a 16 MHz processor and 4 megabytes of RAM. No games, so I started exploring TeX and HyperCard instead. When I finally figured out that HyperCard was not just an address book and appointment manager, and could be used to author your own stacks, I was hooked. A little while later, I messed around with Think C but finding myself overwhelmed with Mac Toolbox programming and went back to HyperCard.
Ultimately, HyperCard was too restrictive so I switched to Java in 1996 or so, when the Java implementation was extremely slow and rudimentary and the applet buzz was in overdrive. Apple's software and hardware was getting stangnant, so I convinced my parents to get a PC instead; switched the whole family to Linux some time in 1997, after spending the better part of a week downloading Slackware 3.3 over dialup. After some unfinished attempts at implementing games and various other apps in Java, I started working on jEdit in 1998. Moved to Canberra, Australia in 1999 and finished my high school studies there.
I moved back to Wellington in early 2002 and started a degree in Mathematics at the Victoria University of Wellington. Only studied there for 6 months; moved to Ottawa, ON, Canada in the second half of 2002 and continued my studies at the University of Ottawa. After taking some courses on Prolog, Scheme and C++, became frustrated with Java and started looking around at other languages. In 2003, came up with an idea for a video game with a friend and started implementing it (still using Java). My friend was doing graphics and music. I wanted to have in-game scripting, so I put together a simple stack-based language which would eventually outlive the game project (my friend lost interest and moved on). I became increasingly frustrated with Java, and decided to re-implement Factor in C some time in the summer of 2004. Finished my BA Mathematics degree at the end of 2005.
I started a Masters in Mathematics in early 2006, and decided to hand off jEdit development to the community. Together with some blog posts critical of Java on my old JRoller blog, this marked my exit from the Java community. I got an Apple quad G5 and switched to Mac OS X; after 9 years away, I was once again a Mac user. Factor was now my primary language.
An exciting job opportunity came up, and after I defended my Masters in December 2007, I moved to Minneapolis, MN, USA, where I currently reside.
The story continues...
My e-mail address is slava@factorcode.org.
You can also find me on irc.freenode.net in the #concatenative channel.
I'm slava_pestov on Twitter.
A resume is available on request.
(perpetually, of course)
visitors since April 1, 1994.