The birth of Åkerön

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:09:51 -0400, Joseph Rushton Wakeling  
<joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I understand that Andrew Edwards declined to have his talk recorded, and  
> the
> slides have not been uploaded either.  So, what was it actually about?   
> The
> abstract is ... not exactly informative. :-P

I can do my best here, from memory. If I get anything wrong, please  
correct me!

The first part of Andrew's talk was about his personal journey to the  
point where he was standing before us.  Service in the Marine Corps (thank  
you, Andrew), an interest in computers, being someone who was always  
inspired to contribute to society as a software developer.  His talk  
included several funny anecdotes, I would not do them justice to repeat  
them here from my bad memory :)

So then he talked about Akeron, his company that he wants to use to  
promote several things.  One is helping people learn about D.  To that  
end, he has established the web site dtutor.org (which Andrei registered  
during his talk I believe).  See his announcement here:   
http://forum.dlang.org/post/km6ccu$1ads$1@digitalmars.com

If I recall correctly, he has interest specifically in Natural Language  
Processing, and in helping people learn D.  There was also something about  
the USMC trying to develop some sort of software that they had difficulty  
finishing, and I think he wanted to help them develop that using D, but I  
am really quite unsure of the details on that.  I'm sure at some point, it  
will become more clear.

It was an unusual talk, to say the least.  And I applaud his efforts to  
try and help people learn how to program, especially in D.  I would like  
to see a premier and popular site spring out of dtutor.org.

I know this is short on details, but it was over a month ago.  Andrew, you  
may want to post an executive summary of your talk based on your slides,  
to set the record straight :)

-Steve