Famine in the Bullpen: a software engineer reviews America's creativity crisis

Taylor, Julian Steven: - Mr. Taylor was called away from his college sociology studies in 1978 to resolve a problem with an electronic flow meter. That turned into an eight year project developing unique hand held instrumentation for the petroleum industry. These included a high accuracy pressure gauge and an NBS-traced metrology lab for verifying its accuracy. Having read, in Electronics magazine, of a brilliant scalar super-computer being developed by Denelcor in Aurora, Colorado, he applied for a position constructing these computers. He held that position for only one year because in the end, Denelcor had made some problematic business decisions that led to its failure. Mr. Taylor moved to Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin). He was responsible for development of electronic systems for simulators and robotics for the U.S. Space Shuttle. One of his last roles involved the development of circuit boards to plug into a Sun Microsystems computer. In order to use those circuit boards, he developed the required software drivers. Since developing driver software is an esoteric skill, he applied for a position at Sun Microsystems where he was taken on as a member of the technical staff in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He developed several software solutions that improved Sun's mechanism for distributing software patches. With this and several other solutions, resulting in twelve patents overall, Mr. Taylor was soon promoted to staff and then senior staff, supervising various technical teams. He served on one of Sun's three invitation-only Architecture Review Committees assessing and providing technical guidance to applicant projects. After thirteen years Sun began to falter. Mr. Taylor turned to the newspaper industry where he served as a lead architect for MediaNews Group, a company providing all online services for roughly seventy U.S. newspapers. It was a single web service hub answering a large number of requests every day. One accomplishment during his five years there was to head the team that developed a software architecture that would read thousands of newspaper articles per day and identify the place or places where the action took place. It would then mark that on a map. At the time, there was only one other company doing that, and their software only worked with rigidly formatted legal contracts. From there to a contracting position with Gorilla Logic in Boulder, Colorado where Mr. Taylor worked for various companies including Digital Globe where he wrote software for assessing and assembling satellite imagery in support of industrial and military clients. Now an engineer at Rosetta Stone, Mr. Taylor writes software in support of language learning. He has been married to Janette Keene Taylor for over thirty years. They live at 9000 feet altitude in Nederland, Colorado. They have two grown children, Colette, a beekeeper and entrepreneur and Maxwell, a poet and entrepreneur. Julian has produced three audio books serving as primary voice performer for two of them. One of the audio books is the U.S. Constitution, available for free download at http: //thegreatcollaboration.org. With his spouse, he conducts live readings of the U.S. Constitution in libraries and book stores. In his spare time, he develops Object-Oriented software and writes.