I went to UIUC and received a BA in humanities and a masters degree in computer science. Illinois was an experience in hanging out, eating pizza, and competing with friends to see who could delay the longest before working on programming assignments.

I graduated in 1984 and took a job at Andersen Consulting, where I did standard mainframe work; i.e., large projects, methodologies, CASE tools, etc. My last assignment at Andersen involved developing a "designware" product. For this assignment we explored what can be reused from project to project within an application domain. At what level of abstraction should the design be reused? Can software be reused, and if so, what should its characteristics be? (And what do we mean by software reuse?) Can aspects of the development process be reused? This was interesting, but when the project ended (prematurely and ambiguously), I decided to pursue these interests as a grad student in "Computers and Information Systems" at the University of Michigan Business School.

Unfortunately, that didn't turn out to be the best place to explore such issues either. (Details upon request.)

I now work in the Smalltalk group of the "Emerging Technologies Group" at Compuware Corporation, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Prior to this job I had no experience in Smalltalk. I'm hoping the infusion of the pure Smalltalk OO view into my interests in reuse, methods, and abstraction, will result in interesting work.

Max Rahder
 
mailto:max@rahder.com
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This page is rather out of date (I created it in the fall of 1995), but I'll leave it for historical context. Since writing it, I've gone through the typical professional turmoil, and am now an independent consultant living in Madison, Wisconsin. I have a wife and two kids, aged 7 and 11. Professionally, I do Java training and "mentoring". Training means writing courseware and giving classes such as intro Java, MVC, and some product-specific training in Eclipse, WSAD, etc. Mentoring means going on short-term assignments helping project teams adopt Java and OO practices. -- MaxRahder, January 2004

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Update: Doing more "architecture" work. Tried Scrum on my last project. Currently consulting as sort of an "enterprise architect" at a large corporation. The organization is pursuing a trendy path - SOA, ESB, with a matrix organization (lots of high specialized roles working on several projects at once).

May 16, 2006
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