John Tobler

• I am a grandfather (http://www.fefis.org/home/johnt/penny/)!
  



• My first program was a symbolic logic routine in Fortran IV for an IBM 1401, written in 1962. I've pretty much been through the evolution of programming since then.
  



• I learned a bit of Smalltalk as my first object-oriented language (using Smalltalk-V). Once upon a time, I developed hospital clinical laboratory software systems in PL/I on minicomputers (Prime and IBM AS/400). After escaping the big-iron world, with its big-iron minds, I developed object-oriented components in C++ and (heaven help me!) VB 6.0 for large-scale educational lending software systems. My employers during those years were never interested in a Smalltalk project, so my interest in Smalltalk remained personal.
  



• I _was_ investigating relocation to somewhere (1) warmer than Nebraska and (2) with an ocean; but, I'm not investigating, anymore. I now work in Squeak as a Software Engineer for exobox Inc. in beautiful San Diego, CA! Count me a happy camper!
  



• I am very interested in design patterns, UML, and object-oriented design in generally. I want to know "What lies beyond objects -- what's next?" My current focus is on refactoring and extreme programming (XP). I also work on personal projects in Python, Java, and whatever. I am a systems generalist and general systems thinker.
  



• I'm learning to escape the black hole of the Microsoft gravity well and am starting to explore life as a Linuxian both at work and at home.
  



• I am a volunteer editor for the Dmoz Open Directory Project (ODP) and I edit the directory's Squeak, Morphic Toolkit, and Smalltalk categories, among others. For more details, please see my Dmoz Editor's Profile. Please feel free to recommend cool Squeak, Morphic, and Smalltalk URL's. There is an "Add URL" link on every Dmoz ODP page just for that purpose. Several major search engines, such as Netscape, Lycos, HotBot, Dogpile, CityFind.Net, etc., use the ODP's database. I support Dmoz because "Humans do it better."