This was going to be the basis of innovatorquiz #68, a little quiz I have been running on my facebook page on innovation.
As has become routine, a quick check of name spellings, dates and obscure detail to make the clues a little harder, I headed out on the web to put this one together. Sadly this time, I learnt of a loss. SO instead of posting this one as a quiz, I am going to tell a short story.
Around 1993 I had started working on a relatively complex project for a small Cambridge based Company. I had dropped into the role of system architect by accidental default. I could visualise the whole system and its various interactions including all the network activity and hence, had achitected it all. My task for the next year or so, as well as holding all the disparate pieces together, was to write a network server that also handled realtime IO from a couple of scanners, other network output, alarms, disk storage etc all for a steel rolling mill. And I had to make work reliably under Windows 95. Enough said.
I started looking for a way to handle Finite State Machines design and implementation that made adaption easier. I first came across the work of Paul J Lucas. As part of his MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, he have produced a library and tools for what is now known as CHSM Concurrent Hierarchical State Machine.
At the same time I can across Pieter Hintjens, with his company iMatix and his web server project Xitami. Pieter was using Paul's work and Xitami was being deployed at CERN. Pieter and I swapped code, ideas etc etc over the course of about of what turned out to be a couple of years.
I was about four years into the engineering of software and had been encountered the world of software patents, many frivolous adding to the difficulty of commercial software production. Pieter was passionate about the subject and was president of the Foundation for a Free Information Structure, ad association that fights against software patents. I could see both sides of the coin, the need to protect a companies investment and the need to stop frivolous patents. Peiter and chatted about this fairly often.
Our paths diverged although I 2009/10, I picked up some of his work from Libero and ZeroMQ as I wrote an MPI compliant implementation to work on top of my patented networking hardware. We exchanged a few emails once again just reconnecting and touching base.
I had come across his work once again with his book 'The Psychopath Code' in about 2015.
My plan had been to make a rather obscure quiz entry for this one with CERN as the reference. I knew there would be lots of guesses around other web based innovation at CERN but few would get this one, although I suspect a few might get close. There was a lot of innovation thanks to the work of Paul and Peiter.
I went to look up how to spell Pieter's name and was shocked and saddened to find he had passed away some years ago at the age of 54 leaving 3 young kids. He documented some of his fight with cancer and his journey to euthanasia - http://hintjens.com/blog:115 - on his website. His site is worth a browse and read.
Thank you Peiter.
