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Gordon Hamachi |
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Web Publishing |
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Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence--Crunching work units for Seti@Home. |
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Finding new life for old computers
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Bicycle Touring
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I work at Inzap, developing applications with Java Server Pages. Inzap is a financial services startup company with 20 to 30 employees.
Before that I worked at some other interesting places:
I was employee number 10 at Selectica, Inc, an e-Commerce company. I liked the title Senior Software Engineer, but reluctantly agreed to assume the title Software Development Manager. For most of my 5 years there, my life there was Selectica's Java GUI Builder, until management killed it to concentrate on HTML "thin client" technologies. After that I lead the ACE Analyst project and served as a figurehead manager of the ACE Web Builder project.
I joined Vitria Technology, where I was also employee number 10. I worked on the Stanford Budget project as well as some cool user-interface demoware that was said to have been enthusiastically received by Fred Smith at Federal Express. I left just before Vitria relocated from downtown Palo Alto to Mountain View.
Before Vitria I spent 7 years at Adobe Systems, where according to my pay stub I was employee number 475. I was hired there to work on Adobe's electronic forms product, TrueForm; however, it was discontinued about the time I started. Instead, I worked on Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, NeXT, Windows, SGI, and SunOS. I was the technical lead for NeXT and Unix versions of Illustrator, as well as for Adobe Acrobat 1.0 for Unix. I also worked on Acrobat 2.0. I left there just before Adobe moved from Mountain View to downtown San Jose.
After graduate school I went to work for Cadlinc, which later changed its name to Cimlinc. Some friends from Cal and Xerox assured me that they were going to go public soon, and invited me to get in on their IPO. Cimlinc had a Unix workstation on the market before Sun Microsystems. Cimlinc also had cool mouse-driven graphical applications when the Apple Macintosh was a 128K toy. In spite of these Cimlinc never went public, but it remains in business today.
My big thrill at Cimlinc was writing the core of a product called ID 2.0, a text and graphics editor that was way ahead of its time. It had page layout, a scripting language and database connectivity. I left when development relocated to Troy, Michigan.
While I was a grad student I worked as a research intern at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Working under Maureen Stone in the Imaging Science Lab, I wrote the first color painting program for the Dorado and shared a cube with Scott Kim. Chuck Geschke (Adobe's President) was the group manager, and John Warnock (Adobe's CEO) taught me everything I know about halftoning. Eric Schmidt (now CEO of Novell) was a grad student who used to give me rides back to Berkeley.
I went to the University of California at Berkeley as a Regents' Scholar and received a BA in Computer Science. I liked it so much I stayed on through the 24th grade, when I finally escaped with my PhD. As a Research Assistant working on the Magic VLSI layout editor I was supervised by John Ousterhout (now CTO of Ajuba Solutions). Other team members were Robert Mayo,Walter Scott, and George Taylor. I also became one of the world's foremost experts on the then-wildly-popular Unix game called Rogue.