Introduce Yourself to Baltimore FP

[Alex]

I think it would make sense to have folks introduce themselves,
especially at this stage, so that as members try to plan out
presentations for the group they have some idea of the audience to
whom they are speaking. Additionally if we get significant interest it
can serve as a useful way for people to introduce themselves to the
established group. I'll start:

I'm Alex Redington, I've been using a LISP of some form or another
since 1999 and started playing in Clojure last year when I started
working at Relevance. I've been professionally developing since 2003
in Java, Ruby, or Clojure. I contributed to the development of
ClojureScript. I have two open source Clojure projects; monotony, a
library for working with cyclic time and scheduling (http://github.com/
aredington/monotony); and fidjet, a configuration convenience tool for
both library authors and library users (http://github.com/aredington/
fidjet).

I like speaking and presenting, I've been accused of being a good
teacher, and I feel competent presenting lots of complicated bits of
Clojure right up to macros that write macros.

[Gary Trakhman]

Beat me to the punch, ha.

My name's Gary Trakhman, I'm pretty new to programming in general, but I really enjoy studying and learning. I work at Revelytix with some pretty awesome jvm FP guys.  My interest in starting the group is to provide myself and others a platform for learning and sharing knowledge.  I think it will be motivating for me to have to clarify thoughts enough to give talks to people :-), and there's a lot of smart guys around I'd also like to learn from.

My programming language history is as follows:

qbasic, scheme, matlab, C, C++, java, as3, more java and now clojure 

my twitter is @gtrakGT

I've made the thread sticky.

[John Szakmeister]

My name is John Szakmeister. I'm new to functional programming, but
have been dealing with concurrent applications for a long time. I'm
interested in functional programming, especially ones like Clojure and
Erlang, because it just seems like a better way to write software--and
because they offer some interesting alternatives than manually locking
and unlocking resources.

I'm still a newbie when it comes to Clojure, but would love to do more
with it. I've been programming professionally since 1997, primarily
in C, but also in Python, Java, and C++. I've been up and down the
software stack. Device drivers and embedded systems, to more
enterprise-y applications. I'm actually an Electrical Engineer, but I
love computer science. :-)

-John

[Blaine Nelson]

Blaine Nelson here.  I've been tinkering off-and-on with a lisp for over ten years.  As for common lisp, I was (it's been a while) comfortable with recursion, passing functions around (to include using functions like map and apply) and very, very simple macros.  Three years ago I went to a few of the DC Clojure Study Group meetings, but then my kid started walking and my opportunities for self study dwindled dramatically.  Things are a little easier on that front, so I'm taking another stab at Clojure.  I'm a little over half-way through Halloway's _Programming Clojure_ and Fogus and Houser's _The Joy of Clojure_ - bouncing between the two has proved pretty useful.  

I've been coding professionally for almost 5 years.  My work is mostly in C, but there has been some Java, C++ and Perl. Before software, I was a systems engineer.  As a systems engineer, I used common lisp to write discrete event simulations.  

Like John, I believe that languages like Clojure and Erlang offer a better way to do concurrent programming.  Unlike John, I don't actually do any concurrent programming (other than a tiny bit of openMp).  The reason: I'm just too scared.  Locks, mutexes, semaphores.  Eeek.  I'm just not smart enough.  Maybe with the right language, I'll be able to do some concurrent programming?

[John Stoneham]

Hi, all. My name's John Stoneham, I work at a company called TexelTek doing government work. I spend most of my day in Groovy/Grails, but I've had some Common Lisp background in college, I have done some playing with Scheme in my spare time, and we do some Clojure work at TexelTek. Definitely interested in doing more and meeting some interesting folks.

[Micah Adams]

Hi all-

I'm Micah Adams. I'm a Senior Software Engineer with The Canton Group in Baltimore. I'm using Clojure daily in an enterprise-scale Messaging Over Middleware system I'm building for a bunch of our clients.

My background is in application development as it relates to imaging informatics, I spent a lot of time working at the University of Maryland's Radiology Department doing custom software development for them.

I'm big into Clojure these days, I enjoy working with Erlang as well, and I'm interested in Scala's interoperability with the android sdk (clojure's support is a little thin these days).


I'm interested in networking, hanging out, talking programming, maybe getting a beer every now and then.

[rzezeski]

My name is Ryan Zezeski. I work at Basho as a developer for our core
product, Riak. Riak is a highly available, distributed database
written in Erlang. I've been programming professionally for around 6
years now. Most of my experience has been in Java. In 2008 I started
playing with Clojure but never did anything serious with it. About a
year and a half ago I decided to learn Erlang and now I pretty much
use it exclusively at my day job.

I still love Clojure and would like to build something with it one
day. I love to talk programming, especially over beers.

[Patrick O'Neill]

Hi folks,

My name's Patrick.  I'm a grad student in computational biology at UMBC, and I've been interested in functional programming languages like Haskell and various lisps for a few years. 

I'm glad to hear that this group exists: I found it through some late-night googling and was disappointed to see that I just missed the first meetup.  I'd be very interested in listening to (or giving) talks about languages and pet projects, or just hacking and hanging out.

Cheers,
Patrick.

[Nathaniel Waisbrot]

I'm Nate. I heard about this group last night at the Maryland
ontology meet-up.

I work at Highfleet, a deductive database company based at the Brewers
Hill development, where I mostly write in Java. When I was in school,
I worked in AI and fell in love with Lisp, so it's been exciting to
see Clojure get some attention. I like dabbling in languages, the
more elegant the better, and talking about programming.