About Me
I’m a retired Software Engineer. I grew up in Toronto and I’ve been programming since sixth grade and really enjoy digging into ideas with computers. I’ve worked at Meta, and been the Artificial Intelligence Lead at Rockstar Games New England. Before that I was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, first at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, then at the Media Lab. And before that I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. I currently live in Lexington, MA, USA.
I was part of The Centre for Metahuman Exploration
I founded and led Esc, a virtual 3D nightclub
The Journal of my road trip across America
You’ll need Acrobat ReaderI co-founded Grey Thumb, an artificial life interest group
How to communicate with an alien race
I (might have) met Roger Waters
I was a programmer on Star Trek: Armada
Calculating Pi in a video game
I sang in the band “Booty Resonant Frequency.”
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Author Archives: martincmartin
Finding A Job You’ll Love: The Reverse Phone Screen
Once you’ve sent out resumes, you’ll hopefully get a few people interested in phone screening you. You’re really best off if you prepare for these and for the in-person interview. Get a relevant textbook and start reading it in the … Continue reading
Finding A Job You’ll Love: Locating Opportunities
I’ve changed jobs a bunch of times over the last few years, and now I’ve found one I’m going to stick with for quite a while. So I thought I’d write up the tricks and tips I’ve learned for anyone … Continue reading
Finding A Job You’ll Love: Recruiters
Ah recruiters. If you understand their motivations and find a good one, they can work wonders. But the average and bad ones can be worse than searching yourself. When looking for a job, you should definitely search on your own … Continue reading
Reading The Fine Manual
I’m always amazed how long people spend trying to figure out software by fumbling around with it, rather than reading the manual. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Golly Martin, reading manuals is all swell and good, but … Continue reading
Introductory Books on Web Testing
Someone at work asked for introductory books on testing, that would help them test our web site. I think these are the best, and thought I’d have some fun with Amazon’s web widgets. Amazon.com Widgets
Concurrency ≠ Threads
Here’s a conversation I seem to be having over and over these days: Someone else: Computers are getting more and more cores. So, we need to thread our software to take advantage of them. Me: But threads (the Dijkstra style … Continue reading
Should you pursue your PhD?
“A PhD is a big, multi-year project. You really learn self-reliance, how to budget your time, and how to motivate yourself,” says Martin Martin, a senior software engineer with a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. From Should you … Continue reading
Where are the fast dynamic languages?
But I also knew, and forgot, Hoare’s dictum that premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. — Donald Knuth Something bizarre happened on the Groovy-dev mailing list the other day. Alex Tkachman made what I thought was … Continue reading
What I’ve Learned From Programming In Lisp
Two years ago I landed a job at ITA Software, which Paul Graham called one of the “ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work,” along with Google. And one of the interesting things about ITA is that … Continue reading
Ian Simon Martin-Swader
Ian Simon Martin-Swader joined our family July 12, 2007 at 1:17 pm 6 pounds 0 ounces 18 inches long Mother doing well Father low on sleep – Martin, Joy, Amber, Miles and Ian #flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, … Continue reading
Martin C. Martin 