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 Florida, USA in a little town called Cocoa. It is about 45 minutes east of Disney World, quite near the Indian River Lagoon/Atlantic Ocean and the NASA Kennedy Space Center. The city was orginally a fishing village founded around 1860 - no one is quite sure how it got the name, but the U.S. Postal authorities rejected the original name “Indian River 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 late 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, open source development.
Currently, I’m employed at Canonical Ltd., working with Launchpad.net. 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 advising my brothers on their cool startup, Statiksoft.
