Who is This Man?

Q. So who is N1MM, and why is he writing a free contest logging program?

A.Well my picture is on the right. That's me at my real job at a large financial institution.

My real job is as a computer design architect. I work with application programming teams to help them design applications that will perform reliably, scale and fit into the infrastructure at our company.

I have been employed designing and coding computer systems since I graduated from MIT in 1971. I've been an application programmer, a VM systems programmer, an artificial intelligence system designer and many other jobs within the computer field.

As a ham for over 40 years, my main interest has always been contesting. I don't remember my first contest, but it was probably the Tennessee QSO party. I do remember what a thrill it was the first time I worked over one contact a minute!

About four years ago, I got frustrated with the computer logging programs that I was using, because they were buggy and too hard to use. I figured that if I wrote my own, then any bugs that I wanted fixed, I could fix myself!

So why is this program free? It didn't really seem like I could make a lot of money selling it, so why irritate people by asking them for money? If I did that, then there would be a lot of expectations as to how fast I fix problems, and what features I add. I still get that, but I can always say: "Hey, it's open source -- write it yourself!" I don't do that often, but it's nice to know that I can. It keeps the work from becoming a burden.

73,
Tom - N1MM