Ian Lewis' Blog

Just watched this video of Bob giving a presentation at C4[1] about erlang. It's about a year old and Bob had been using erlang for almost a year at that point. Bob always seems to have his hands in things just before they become super popular. Erlang seems to be one of those things. JSON was another. He's even the guy that coined the term jsonp before that was really popular. Anyway, highly informative. I might give erlang a try a little later on.

I found out today that the principle author of a popular Javascript/AJAX library Mochikit is my former highschool classmate Bob Ippolito. I remember him being pretty smart. I supposed he would make a name for himself in some CS circles and it looks like he has. He is also apparently a co-founder of Mochi Media, a company that makes products for content creators. Mochibot can be used to track usage of Adobe Flash content. It looks like they are moving into some advertising space by creating an advertising system for casual online games.

Interesting that Bob has moved into this area. Mochikit looks like it's had some extensive work done on it in the past few years so it looks like it's matured well but I imagined a bit more technical, low level path like kernel or low level API development for Bob rather than the relatively high level application/library development in javascript/web applications. I guess everyone follows the buck in the end to some extent and the money is in web dev.