The author as a younger man
Hello, my name is Dylan Thomas. I’ve have a varied and interesting career in technology which all began on Sun workstations while studying geography. Yes, I’m a geographer by training, getting my BSc. in Human and Physical Geography at the University of Reading (say “Redding” not “Reeding”) in England. I moved to the United States from my native England many years ago and then got my MA in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC).
I was bitten by the computer bug as I tried to figure out geographic information systems and quickly came to the realization that I’d been doing it all wrong: text files and command line interfaces were the way to go, and graphic user interfaces just got in the way of doing work accurately and quickly.
Scripting came first: my proudest early moment was piping a 60MB (yes, megabyte!) file through a sed command and having it work so darn fast that I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what has gone ‘wrong’. Then I learned something call AML for GIS scripting. Then I grew up and learned C#, having skipped Java entirely the first time around.
Since then I’ve done a variety of things like:
- Selling, PM-ing, and coding system integrations for consulting engineering company, mostly in the water, wastewater, and municipal markets
- Defining and delivering social features on Bing
- Working with some of Google’s biggest and most interesting Maps and Earth customers.
- Getting Android Auto running in the majority of cars on the planet.
But the whole way through, I keep geeking out with languages, text editors, and new ways to solving the same old problems. I am, you see, an incurable tinkerer. Which is why my blog stops and starts, and covers a rather odd range of topics in not much depth. It’s how I roll.
Follow the various links to LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub for more. Or stick around here to read posts and get the details on me.