We have now had the pleasure of working with Bjørn for 20 years, so it seemed like an ideal opportunity to ask him to look back over the last two decades.
Bjørn first discovered APL when Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg invited him to participate in an APL course; he also used it in a few courses during his civil engineering degree.
Over the last two decades, Dyalog Ltd has grown from 8 employees to almost 30, has embraced evolving technology and trends, become a more geographically-distributed company with employees across multiple timezones, and seen a change of CEO. However, the combination of freedom and responsibility that Bjørn enjoys has not changed in this time. This has helped him in his role creating interfaces from APL to other APLs – more generally, developing tools that are not written in APL. For example, he wrote an interface from APL to ODBC so that APL user can access SQL databases. Bjørn derives great satisfaction from providing tools that customers need. His proudest achievement is the creation of Conga, Dyalog’s framework for TCP/IP communications (most new applications uses Conga directly or indirectly through other tools). There have been challenges too, such as developing his cryptography skills to a sufficient level to help colleagues and customers, but he has found that good spirits and persistence usually prevail in such situations.
Bjørn’s motivation at work remains his enjoyment in solving interesting problems and helping others. As he states, “I really like helping the customers”! He intends to continue in this role, although is now reducing his hours so that he can spend more time doing the things that he enjoys outside work, such as sailing in the summer and badminton in the winter. He’s also a very good dancer – his tango is legendary amongst his colleagues!
Bjørn is looking forward to many more years of serving Dyalog Ltd’s customers.
[Editor’s note: Morten started at the same time as Bjørn – his retrospective on how Dyalog Ltd and Dyalog have evolved since then will be published soon.]
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