Who Are You?
My name is Paul Steinbach. I live in Waterloo, Ontario with my family, a dog and lots of computers (probably too many.) My earliest memory of a computer is sitting at a card punch somewhere in the University of Waterloo math building, probably around 1971 – 1972. I got my start programming in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple ][+ clone. As an engineering undergraduate at Waterloo I moved on to PCs, eventually discovered C and Unix, and emerged at the end with a BASc in Computer Engineering.
From 1989 to 1996 I worked for MKS Inc. in Waterloo. I started as one-half of their tech support crew. I moved from software developer, then team lead, and ended as the product manager for their Jolt Cola prize winning MKS Toolkit.
Since 1996 I have worked in medical software, with a two-year break in the middle when I was a stay-at-home dad and ran Blue Marble as a software consulting business. I now work full-time for a large health-care software company as a software developer and team lead.
Why are you writing a blog?
I’m hoping that maintaining a blog will help improve my writing. So, in that sense this is a selfish exercise. Also, blogs have been a treasure trove of solutions to software and computer problems I’ve encountered over the years. Sometimes, the solutions are incomplete or out of date, and I keep scribbled notebooks detailing how I solved certain problems. It occurs to me that I should share some of what I’ve learned. I’ll use this blog as a place to share things I find interesting. If someone else finds them helpful, that’s great. I intend to leave comments open on the posts – let me know if you’ve found something useful…
Why “Blue Marble”?
I wanted to set up a site under a name other than my own name. My favourite colour is blue. The name “Blue Marble” sounded kinda neat, and I have fond memories of a TV show from when I was a child called Big Blue Marble.
