Keynote: Dr. Tom Love - Co-creator of Objective-C

Presentation from Modev Tablet Conference, September 14, 2012. www.modevtablet.com

MoDev is much more than just another Meetup. We have grown from a grass roots organization of mobile developers to one of the leading mobile technology and business organizations in the country.

Dr. Love will take us back to the early 80's when he and Brad Cox first developed Objective-C and eventually convinced a guy named Steve Jobs to use the language to run applications on his NeXT workstations. Later NeXT did a "reverse takeover of Apple" and the rest is history. Objective-C is now the third most used programming language in the world powering all iOS devices. So what's different today than 30 years ago? Not really that much, according to Tom. Enjoy stories and words of wisdom from a true technology legend.

Dr. Tom Love (Founder at ShouldersCorp)
Dr. Tom Love is best known in the industry for being the first commercial user of Smalltalk-80 and the co-creator with Brad Cox of Objective-C. In addition to this amazing feat, Tom has been involved in leading edge software engineering projects since the mid-1970's. Most recently, he led his company ShouldersCorp in an assessment of the feasibility and risks associated with the reengineering of the VistA system for the CIO of Veterans Health Administration. Tom has held significant technical and management positions in companies such as GE, ITT, IBM and Morgan Stanley. At Morgan Stanley, he was the Managing Director responsible for all trading and risk management software worldwide. As a VP of IBM consulting, he won and managed a major project to develop a Computerized Medical Record system for a 900-bed medical center. He also was responsible for designing and implementing an assessment center selection process for new IBM consultants. In the past 14 years he has had direct on-site management responsibility for 19 100 day agile development projects -- all of which were delivered on time, on spec and within budget -- the largest of these projects involved a team of 175. Many lessons learned are recorded in his Cambridge University book, Object Lessons: lessons learned from object-oriented development projects. Tom has also published a series of well regarded papers on software metrics, estimation techniques and human factors beginning in the 1970's. He founded the first company selling object-oriented development tools and organized the meeting which led to ACM's OOPSLA conference -- the largest annual conference devoted to object technology. Dr. Love is currently leading an ACT/IAC Working Group to develop recommendations to the incoming administration regarding Health IT, is on the Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute Board of Visitors, is a founder of the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects (WWISA), and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington where he studied the characteristics of successful computer programmers a long time ago!