About
I am refreshingly cool in the summer and comfortingly warm in the winter.
I think learning computer languages is fun.
I think people are more important than computers.
I am addicted to books.
I am scared of paper cuts.
I am short for my height.
I am funny, sad, energetic, and optimistic.
I think listening is more important than talking.
I think speaking up is more important than staying silent.
I’m not afraid of you.
I’m afraid of me.
Hi! I’m Elliot Murphy. I live on the east coast of Maine, USA in a harbor town called Portland. I’m trying to learn how to fly, and enjoying living in a small walkable city.
I’ve been programming as a hobby for a long time (since I was 8 years old). The only formal education I have related to programming is a class in BASIC when I was 8, and a class in x86 asssembly language when I was serving an Electronics Technician apprenticeship for Siemens AG. Nevertheless, I have been working as a professional programmer since the 1990′s.
I’ve tried many different jobs, but the one that I’m most proud of is starting my own company building and repairing SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) PC’s and networks for when I was 13 years old. It turns out that at 13, the anti-child labor laws prevented me from being hired at the grocers like so many youngster do for their first job, but there were no such restrictions on owning a business – so I bootstrapped a company. The company only lasted about 3 years, but the lessons I learned left me with a much more holistic view of running a business than I would have ever had otherwise.
After shutting down my business to focus more carefully on college (I got my high school diploma through the mail, so I was able to graduate from high school at 15), I spent over a decade working for large corporations, first specializing in telephony systems for stockbrokers/emergency dispatch centers, then writing commercial data protection software for Windows NT and Unix. Later I became very passionate about open source, and spent a couple of years working for MySQL – first as a lead developer, then as Director of Development for the core server team. I believe in distributed teams, and spent 5.5 years working at Canonical Ltd., where I ran some of the development and technical operations teams.
Currently, I am CTO at a small bootstrapped medical software startup. Naturally, the opinions expressed here are my own, and are not those of my current nor any previous employer. The closest thing I have to a resume at the moment is my LinkedIn profile, but I should warn you that I don’t have much time left over from working fulltime, hanging out with my family, volunteering in the deaf community, and planning my next adventure.
