My name is Brad Howes. I’ve been a programmer, product manager, and farmer at various times in my life. Currently, I’m programming and living in Paris, France with my wife Amanda and our three children: Zoë, Harrison, and Claudia.

My professional web presence is pretty much this:

• LinkedIn Profile – best way to contact me if I don’t know you
• GitHub – not much there, but I do have a nifty Python interface for a SLiMP3 display if you still have one (Pyslimp3).
• This blog

I’m a seasoned developer of large systems written in C++ and Python. I’m not too shabby with other languages such as Swift, Javascript, Java, and even Emacs Lisp.

Past Lives

This is how my time-line goes:

~1975 — BASIC

I started programming in BASIC on massive desktop HP calculators at my dad’s office at NASA. Something like this:

What I remember best about that time was the smell: the metallic, sweet tang of electronics.

~1980 — Z-80 Assembly

I got my first computer, a Radio Shack Model III. I had done quite a bit of BASIC programming already on my dad’s Model I, but now I was into Z-80 assembly. I obtained the schematics for the computer, after which I built an external case with two slim height floppy drives (may have been higher capacity, too – I don’t remember). I also swapped out the stock monitor with one that had orange phosphor, and I added a switch to invert the video, putting black text on white background. Although the inverted effect was cool at first, the video circuitry was taxed by the large amount of white on the screen, which would cause a slight whine in the hardware.

1982 — FORTRAN

While in high school, I was able to skip physical education and attend a numerical methods class at the University of Houston. We were required to submit working FORTRAN code as solutions to various exercises. Terminal access at the UofH computer center was incredibly tight during the day but the punch card terminals were always available, so my first assignments were done by submitting batch jobs made up of punch cards.

Sometime later I discovered a Microsoft FORTRAN compiler for the Model III. That was a big step forward in productivity since I could do my class assignments at home.

I also got my first programming gig: a customer at a computer store where I worked was looking to buy a computer to do some wacky stuff involving lists of words and letter-number mappings – perhaps numerology or gematria. I offered to do the programming for her and submit printouts of the results. The hardest part was typing in the word lists each week without errors.

Never did learn what she was hoping to discover.

1983-1984 — IBM 360 Assembly

In 1983, I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. I was forced to take an introductory Pascal course – sigh – but I also got to choose to attend a class on IBM 360 assembly. Way more fun, though editing assembler code on the unergonomic MTS terminals in the computer center was a PITA. My one and only time to ever use EBCDIC while programming.

1987 — First Job

My first job after graduating (from Sarah Lawrence College, not RPI), was at a small firm in New Jersey called Precision Nesting Systems. Originally, I started as a technical writer but I soon moved to doing some FORTRAN and C coding. When I left in ~1990, I was traveling the US and Europe to install systems, train users, troubleshoot problems, and write custom code to interface with various peripherals and CNC machines.

1990 — First Startup

I became a contractor in 1990 and my first assignment was at a startup called BioAutomation, one of many that hoped to tap into the funding from the Human Genome Project. I was doing image analysis to automate the detection of amino acid bands in electrophoresis trays, something like this:

Unfortunately, the founder had worked at a large company doing similar work, so we were sued into bankruptcy. It was fun while it lasted.

1990 — The Corporate Years

I moved to Phoenix, Arizona to join a team IBM assembled to create a new, modern customer service application for American Express. The project was called “CS-90’s” and working on it was a major blast of late night hacking on IBM AIX RS6000 machines in C, X11, and Motif. We also had massive blowouts on Friday evenings at a restaurant down the street from the office, usually resulting in Motorola pagers submerged in daiquiris or margaritas. And maybe a brawl…

1994 — Motorola and Python

I was always a fan of Apple products. I knew that they used Motorola processors so I was excited to join Motorola’s Scottsdale facility. I joined Corporate Computer Services (CCS) which was a sort of internal contracting firm for other areas in Motorola that need a service or programming help. One service I inherited was a email work-flow management system written in Objective-C that ran on a NeXT Cube.

My boss at the time was a big Perl developer, but I was never able to get over the shear ugliness of the code. Instead, I began to work with Python when it was at version 1.5. I even wrote an article for Dr. Dobb’s about a template processing library I created in Python. The “Python Ojbects and HTML” blurb below? That’s my "Template Processing Classes for Python article. I even submitted a tiny patch for Python v1.4 that let one embed an expression wrapped in parentheses inside a string formatting expression. Fun times.

Unlike Larry Wall, I did not make the cover, but the artciel is there starting on page 38.

1999 — Return to the East Coast

I saw a posting on the comp.lang.python for a job opportunity at Dragon Systems in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was tired of the perpetual summer of Arizona and I missed the vibe of the east coast, so I applied, got the job, and moved back east. Loved the company and the co-workers, but sadly everything imploded soon after Dragon was purchased by their chief competitor, Lernout & Hauspie, due to a massive L&H accounting scandal in South Korea. Fortunately for me, I cashed out the little stock I had before things got bad, but the Dragon founders were not so lucky.

I jumped to another startup in Cambridge called ProfitLogic that was attempting to optimize pricing strategies of seasonal apparel – how much to markdown an item and when – to maximize revenue and minimize inventory. The code was a horrible mess of C++ and Python. However, I did get my first introduction to an agile methodology known as extreme programming. Lots of interesting concepts, but the pair-programming took some time to get used to, especially when the partner’s keyboard was in a different layout or filled with crumbs and beard hair.

2001-2010 — The Golden Years

I took a month leave from ProfitLogic to spend time sailing on the Charles river, in the Boston harbor, and in the Caribbean. I went back for a day and then quit. I just did not have the feeling that it was a place for me. After a couple more months sailing, I was ready to work again and I landed a great job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory as a member of their technical staff. This is/was such an incredible place to work: the people, the facilities, the assignments. I was working in C++, Python, Qt, and Matlab for surveillance-related projects. I traveled quite a bit to the Dallas, Texas airport (DFW) for one project, and an undisclosed military location in Nevada for another. At the former, I got to stay at a Marriott hotel; at the latter I basically got a dorm room with a too-soft bed.

I would have stayed at MIT/LL, but my wife and I were seeking out opportunities to live in Europe with our three children. And in 2010, Skype called.

2010 — The Right Side of the Atlantic

I joined Skype’s Prague office before Skype was acquired by Microsoft. I started out as a C++ programmer on their back-end system involved in connecting Skype calls with landline phones. This service allowed Skype users to dial most landline/mobile phone numbers. The other direction – from landline to Skype – is a service whereby a Skype user can purchase the use of a landline phone number in a country, and calls to that number will call into to a Skype application running on a desktop or a mobile device. Very cool service. My wife still has a Skype number in Pennsylvania so that her mother can reach her in Prague by dialing a local number.

When Windows 8 was a year away from launch, we started a new team to support its push notifications. I and others developed a simple service to generate push notifications for Windows 8 desktop. We soon added support for Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, and later on for Amazon’s Kindle and a few other esoteric systems. Soon after getting the C++ system up and running on Skype’s Debian servers, we transformed into a team of C# developers and we began to focus on retooling the service to run on Microsoft’s Azure platform.

With that change, I moved over from engineering to product management for a change of pace. I was traveling to London quite a bit since most of the other PMs were located in the Skype London office. I was also flying to the west coast about 3 times a year. And I was still trying to do some programming when I could. I developed a performance dashboard for the team in Flask/Python, jQuery/Javascript, and Highcharts using performance data from our Azure micro services.

The really cool thing about the dashboard is that it appeared as a screen saver on the Windows machine that the team used for Skype calls, so it was always visible when the computer was not being used. The screen saver would cycle through the various graphs, one per minute.

I also wrote a log query tool that leveraged Python’s multiprocessing module to perform queries in a map-reduce form – a swarm of parallel tasks would independently search log blobs, and a reduce step would collate the results for presentation to the user. I talk about some of this in various blog postings on this site.

2015 — Intermission

I left Microsoft after 5 years or so. I was burned out so I decided to temporarily retire for a year and just be a househusband – grocery shopping, cooking, picking up the children from school: bliss.

2016 — South Africa

After a year though I kind of needed to get back to work, so I joined Enrian Partners as a consultant. My one big gig there was putting together a chat interface for South Africa’s Nedbank Private Wealth iOS app. I got to visit Johannesburg several times, but never made it to Cape Town.

2017 — Oh la la! Paris!

After a year at Enrian, I landed a developer role with Criteo, in the lovely city of Paris. After years of our children learning French in Prague, they could finally do it for real. Now I’m working in the “Big Data” space, on the algorithms and infrastructure that made Criteo a major player in online advertising. What is truly special about Criteo is that there are no sacred cows in the technology stack. We will adopt anything and everything if it makes our job easier and/or gives us better results than what we had before. I now program in C#, Java, Scala, and Python, and I work with both online (real-time) and offline services, including massive Spark jobs that run on one of “the largest Hadoop clusters in Europe” holding over 170 petabytes of data across 42K cores. Not too shabby!

Why Keystroke Countdown?

A co-worker at American Express – Jim Kimble – once quipped that one should try to minimize mistakes while typing because we only had so many keystrokes in our life before we died. I loved the darkly humorous aspect of there being some magical number of keystrokes $N$ such that $N = 0$ means Game Over, man!.