David has worked for SoftSource since 2022.
Seven Questions with David
When did you first start programming and with what language/computer and what did you like the most about this programming experience?
I was one of the whiz kids of the 80s and cut my coding teeth with a Commodore 64, learning BASIC from the manual and the Compute! and Compute’s Gazette magazines. Eventually, I graduated to assembler and then to an Amiga and C. The very first time I wrote a program that printed a simple “Hello David” on the screen, I got a huge high that hooked me for life. I still get a kick whenever I convince the computer to do what I want.
Describe a project you’ve been involved with which you consider to be your greatest success so far. What made it so successful?
I have worked on several very exciting projects. A recent one is a headless product to control card tables for casinos. It tracks chip usage via RFID tags and manages the rules of the game. It also lets the casino keep track of the chips from the vault to the dealers to the players and back to the vault. Such visibility drastically reduced the money lost due to fraud. This is a deployed product reliably running 24/7 on dozens of tables in cardrooms in California. Careful use of multithreading and memory management, along with robust error handling made this product a success.
If computers and related technology didn’t exist, what do you think your career would be?
I think I would be a molecular biologist. There are some uncanny similarities between computing and the behavior of biological mechanisms at the molecular level.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in your career?
It is always about people. Technology is secondary. It took me years to understand it, but I finally got it through my thick skull.
When it’s time to turn off the computer, what do you do instead?
I love woodworking, it relaxes me. And I get to play with tools!
Anything else you think we would like to know about you?
I am Costa Rican, born and raised (thus fluent in Spanish), and have lived in the US for almost 30 years now.
Do you prefer bacon, sausage or neither?
Bacon, but I am not one to reject sausage. 😉