Thijs Cobben - Data Alchemist

Forging Gold from Data: Data Craftsmanship at your service!

How it started

When I was 11 years old, in 1982, I got a book on Basic from my mother. I didn’t own a computer then, but I was a member of the “Eindhoven Computer Association” and took a course there: once a week, I went to the club and played with a Commodore PET-20, Tandy TRS-III or a whopping Apple IIe computer.

Partially financed from saved birthday and pocket money, we bought a ZX Spectrum computer, and I spent hours and hours typing listings from book, adapting them, and learning how to do some decent BASIC programming (sorry, Mr. Dijkstra! https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/79997-it-is-practically-impossible-to-teach-good-programming-to-students )

My father was enthousiastic. As a radiologist, he did a lot of research on the efficiency of radiology departments, and did so on a type writer with tabular stops for data tables, and on millimeter paper with a rotring pen for graphs. He bought the first Apple Macintosh out there, on my advice, and I learned Overvue, one of the first “spreadsheet” programs out there. A world opened itself to me. The world of functional matrix programming, that we are now all so competent in, called spreadsheet.

Then, in 1986 aged 15, I got my first job, cash desk employee at a Video rental shop (how eighties). My “basic computer skills”, now enriched with a Scheidegger typing diploma, were the main requirement I got the job. It included data entry in dBaseIII for new members, rentals with a barcode scanner and then you had to press some F-key: easy for me. After a few weeks, I programmed a “query” by which to retrieve the members that had their birthday this week for a promotion mailing, and I never sat behind the cash desk again, but had my first data engineering/programming job, completing the home made (unbelievable we did that) ERP video rental system the guy was single handed programming.

My mother, also a doctor, officially hired me for a few hundred guilders and I spent quite some hours programming a “multiple screen data entry wizard” in a VBA (1992 or so) precursor and actually entered hundreds of her research records (immunity versus respirotary diseases in child care vs home care situations) in Microsoft Excel. And here I learned event based programming, object orientation and the use of an IDE (well… a predecessor) in modern application development.

And so it all started, and this path ended up in me studying Cognitive Artifical Intelligence, also ahead of my time, followed by a first job as PhD student and scientific programmer at a computer science department, but here it all started, my 35 year career in data engineering, and that story will be the content of the next blog post.

Geef een antwoord

Je e-mailadres zal niet worden gepubliceerd. Vereiste velden zijn gemarkeerd met *.

*
*