marklauter / laneview

A residential home automation and energy management system I worked on in the 1990s for TeCom, A TECO Energy Company.

Mark Lauter

Cloud Solutions Architect at Insight (Insight Home Insight LinkedIn)

My Life Story in 6 Short Paragraphs

These days I'm Cloud Solutions Architect at Insight. That's a fancy way to say I design and build cloud-based distributed software systems for my clients. I have achieved George Constanza's dream.

When I was 9, the Hillsborough County gifted program introduced me to computer programming and lambda calculus. That was way back in 1978. After high school, I volunteered to serve in the US Army where I crewed Cobra attack helicopters.

When the glamor of extended camping trips in the desert wore off, I came home, shook the rust off my brain, and headed back to school. I was fortunate to participate in the engineering co-op program at Tampa Electric. Before finishing my two-year degree, TeCom, a sister company of Tampa Electric, hired me as a software engineer. That was around 1993.

Since then I've worked for early internet startups (late 90s), IoT and GIS startups, early AI and machine vision startups, and several fin-techs. I also owned a small software engineering consulting firm for 18 years.

I wrote my first domain-specific programming language (DSL) for an electric utility billing system in 1996. In 1998 I wrote a second DSL for server-side dynamic HTML rendering. And in 2008 I wrote a GIS query DSL for a custom GIS database with temporal-spatial sharding.

I have programmed professionally in FORTRAN, C, C++, Delphi (Object Pascal), C#, BASIC, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Perl, LISP, and many obscure languages like Object PAL. If I had to pick a favorite, C# and C would both be in the running. These days I'm trying to catch up with functional programming and I'm slowly writing a property graph storage engine (like Neo4j).

Github Starters

• 🔭 I’m writing a SQL parser with Superpower to complete the Code Crafters SQLite challenge.
• 🌱 I’m learning about category theory because monads make me happy.
• 👯 I’m interested in collaborating on writing a graph database storage engine.
• 🤔 I’m looking for help with understanding how database transactions interact with the buffer pool and write-ahead log.
• 💬 Ask me about whatever.
• 📫 How to reach me: try the issues section on this repo.
• ⚡ Fun fact: I first interacted with a computer via a Teletype Model 37. I have no idea where the actual computer was located. We played Star Trek. The Model 37 laboriously printed every screen refresh. Bang, shake, rumble, shake, rumble, pop, beep! It shook the whole room. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.