I write software for a living. Right now I work at MetaCarta.com.
We have made it our business to be able to locate and index
geographic references in written text. It's a very useful thing,
to be able to find documents by geographic references rather than
keywords (are you looking for news from Boston? Suffolk County?
Dorchester? Eastern Massachusetts? New England?... Why not
all of them? They all overlap. Trying to cover all those
bases is awfully tedious if you really just want to say "tell me what there is to know about this place." That's what we do).
Before that, I worked for athenahealth
in Watertown, Mass. They offer a great medical-billing system
that helps American doctors navigate the diverse and treacherous world
of US medical billing. In an ideal world, such a company should
not need to exist. Since this is the USA, and not an ideal world,
athenahealth is now a thriving public company.
Before that, I worked for a company called Synquiry.com. Despite the best
intentions, and a really great product, they ran out of money in late
September, 2001. (which was a really bad time for a starting company
to need funding) *sigh*
Before that, between 1996 and 2000, I worked for BBN
in Cambridge, Mass. This was a fascinating environment to be working
in, and I really enjoyed it, but after being acquired by GTE, then Bell
Atlantic, it became apparent that the thing to do would be to try my
hand at a smaller company.
And before that, I was a student at Brown University
where I got my Sc.B. degree in Computer Science, with some focusing on
Artificial Intelligence and Databases. While I was there, I TA'ed
classes for Thomas L. Dean and Stan Zdonik.
