Brian Aust

Background

About Brian Aust

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures- Frederick P. Brooks I love to design and build things. Though my early education and interests were with mechanical things, this quality that Brooks describes soon drew me into the world of computer software. From the first time I read The Mythical Man Month this passage has stayed with me, reminding me of why I so enjoy computer programming. The C and C++ programming languages are my native languages, though in the last few years I’ve become quite comfortable with C# and Haskell. Once over the initial learning curve, functional programming has been a fun and useful addition to the toolbox. I learned with Haskell and I’m happy to find FP support in traditionally-imperative languages. Through the years I’ve written software to test the B2 aircraft, to manage disk quotas, use control panels, and synchronize and manage your offline files in Windows, to develop a software medical device, and to train machine learning classifiers on genomic data. About half of my career has involved leading or managing teams. My philosophies of leading are strongly influenced by John Wooden the legendary UCLA basketball coach and the model of team [dys]function found in Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When leading I work to create a safe environment where clarity is expected, conflict is welcome, where people feel safe to commit and critique, and where the team comes first. I am so thankful to earn a living doing what I enjoy. It doesn’t get much better than this.