Neil studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in the 2000s. At the time this was not a popular option; to the best of his recollection, only three universities in the UK offered degrees in the subject!
He found his way to APL due to a fascination with programming languages – not so much programming language development, but more the affordances that different languages provide and reasons why you’d choose one over another in various circumstances. His interest in APL remained for many years after his initial discovery of the language, nurtured by watching presentations and reading articles. Eventually, he found himself talking for two hours about APL with experienced APLer Kai Jaeger, who is a family friend. Neil subsequently tried solving some problems in APL, and the two struck up an email conversation. One day Kai sent Neil an email asking whether he knew JavaScript as Dyalog Ltd were recruiting for a JavaScript toolsmith – Neil did, and was interested in working for an APL company so that he could continue to feed his APL curiosity.
Although Neil is now mostly writing JavaScript to enable APL developers – he’s currently concentrating on eWC, but plans to also evolve Ride and other projects – he’s also excited to be a member of the Tools Group with the potential to further enhance his APL skills.
Neil grew up in the UK, but he lives in his family’s hometown in Franconia (northern Bavaria). He decided to move to the Bavarian mountains almost exactly at the time that the Covid lockdown started, but managed to enjoy the snow anyway.
Outside APL, Neil considers his most surprising hobbies to be crochet and lock-picking. On one of his regular trips from Germany to the UK, he was taken to the side by border control for the dangerous crochet hooks he was carrying; eventually they let him through whilst congratulating him on his current project! He has not yet dared to travel with lockpicks…
Just to be different, Neil has a parrot called Pauli (pow-lee). This is a convenient conversation starter, if needed.
