Dave Pullin - apps4work/co.a4w GitHub Wiki

I am Dave Pullin and I am weird -- if only because I regard 'weird' as a compliment.

I come from an unbroken lineage of ancestors, many of whom were farmers, including my father, and my siblings, and everybody I knew as a child.

My mother describes my childhood, not in terms of my incessant inclination to take things apart to find out how that worked, but her relief the first time I put something back together so that it worked. (If she knew what I has actually doing her relief should have been that I didn't burn the house down or electrocute myself).

Then I became weird by doing something normal. I went to university and got a degree. I was the first person in my family to do; it wasn't normal. But for the son of a farmer who didn't finish grade school and a mother who was notoriously bottom of her class, I kinda hit the ball out the park. I went to one top universities in the world - Cambridge - joined the Cavendish Laboratary - one of the Physics departments in the world, and was top of my class in Theoretical Physics.

I feel a little like Forrest Gump. I didn't know the weird looking guy I met on the stairs every day as a result of our synchonized coffee habit until I recognized his picture in the Cambridge Evening News when he won a prize. It was a foreign prize, so it only made the back page. It was Brian Josephson and he'd won that year's Nobel Prize for Physics.

During my time at the Cavendish, the eight members of department became Nobel prize winners (and, ironically, none since that time).

I met the guy in a cafeteria whose lack of control over his arms made spaghetti a really bad choice of meal. I encountered him later in life when, as IBM UK's Director of Software I had programmers working on how he would control a computer when he lost remaining small ability to move a finger. They were developing cursor control based on eye movements.

Stephen Hawking's predecessor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was, of course, Isaac Newton, so when the department boasts of the achievements of its alumni includes the discovery of Gravity, black holes, splitting the atom, and, interesting for my future career, the invention of computers - Charles Babbage.

Stephen Hawking's successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was another student working for my thesis advisor, Professor Richard Eden. He formulated Super String Theory. I discovered from Richard's autobiography that Richard did not consider him to be his smartest student. Modesty forbids ...

More interestingly, as physics fan, I discovered the Richard's doctorate advisers were Wiener Heisenberg (of the "uncertainty principle") and P.A.M Dirac (of his eponymous equation) and he worked with the famous names of Physics (Einstein etc).

So, under Richard's supervision, I acquired a PhD in a weird combination of economics, computer modelling, statistics and game theory, as a founder member of the Energy Research Group, described in the annals of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, as "weird for a physics department".

Having spent most of my time as a PhD students making computers do clever things, I decided to become a programmer as a real job.

So I am a software guy. I started as a programmer, and then worked my way through 'everything software': architecture and design, technical planning, management, product management, direct sales, channel sales, worldwide marketing, corporate strategy, director, VP, general business manager.

I was the Product Manager for version 2 of the product IBM and Microsoft colluded to monopolize the market for PC operating systems, although they had fallen out before V2 became relevant (at least that's my legal defense). I discovered how smart Bill Gates was at writing contracts and how ingrained in IBM was the idea that only hardware mattered.

And then I became IBM UK's "Chief Microsoft Hater" and learnt at first hand - at the receiving end - the tricks used by Microsoft to arbitrage its monopoly into more monopolies.

I got into offshoring software development before it was fashionable and I discovered, while delighting both programmers and customers, that I could make obscene margins selling really smart super-hard-working programmers in former-Soviet-Union countries. Those programmers later became super-high-paid programmers by, unfortunately, assisting banks on Wall Street rob other banks.

And then I became a hands-on programmer again; because I remembered that I started in this industry because I like that making computers do things . As such I bring a fairly unusual perspective on problems - an executive point-of-view armed with a current detailed practical knowledge of the technology that we can use to solve real world problems effectively and pragmatically.

I have a starred first-class honors degree in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University, and MA, and a PhD in a weird combination of economics, computer modelling, statistics and game theory, as a founder member of the Energy Research Group, described in the annals of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, as "weird for a physics department".

In my spare time I oversee the operation of a couple of horse farms run by my daughters, provide technology consultancy for a few small companies, and move dirt.