Rick Golden

Rick Golden sat in the computer lab at SUNY Fredonia and completed his first CAI tutorial for programming in APL. It was the summer of 1972; he was nine years old. Most of the programming that he has done since then has been in Algol-based languages such as PL/I, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, C#, Objective C, and Java. He did occasionally write code in languages such as APL, FORTH, LISP, and Scheme; however, he could not find an employer that would actually pay him to develop solutions using those non-structured languages. In recent years he has had more success introducing organizations to scripting languages such as Python, Perl, TCL, Ruby, Groovy, and Node.js. He also had the privilege to work in many different domains applying leading technologies through each cutting-edge wave of structured programming, architectural frameworks, and design patterns. He has championed distributed computing, scripting languages, SOA, browser applications, CMS, ESBs, web services, nosql and map-reduce, top-down structured approach, UML, use cases, XP - extreme programming, iterative development, and agile development. And, he is still moving forward. Now, as he approaches his 40th year as a programmer, software architect, and product manager—a career that has spanned eighty percent of his life. He greatly enjoys guiding and coaching the next generation of programmers and software architects—awakening others to the same joy and passion for computing that he has had for the past 40 years.