We’re excited to bring you another Meet Your Developers post. This one comes from Senior Developer, Margaret Hinchcliffe.

Enjoy!

1. What do you do at Maplesoft?
   I work on the software team that develops the user interface for Maplesoft products. In my time at Maple, I’ve worked on Maple, MapleSim, and MapleNet.

2. What did you study in school?
   I studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, in the Co-op program.

3. What area(s) of Maple or MapleSim are you currently focusing on in your development?
   I’m currently working on MapleNet and on ways to bring Maple functionality to the web.

4. What’s the coolest feature of Maple or MapleSim that you’ve had a hand in developing?
   I helped develop the feature that lets you embed videos in a Maple worksheet. I thought that was pretty cool.

5. What do you like most about working at Maplesoft? How long have you worked here?
   I celebrated my twentieth anniversary at Maplesoft this spring. Obviously, I like working here. What I like most is the opportunity to learn new skills in a supportive environment. Our company gym is pretty awesome, too.

6. Favourite hobby?
   I took up boxing a couple of years ago and I really enjoy it. It’s a great workout and there’s always something new to learn.

7. What do you like on your pizza?
   Pepperoni, mushrooms, and fresh basil.

8. What’s your favourite movie?
   The Wizard of Oz. When people say “The book is always better”, I point to this movie as a counterexample.

9. What skill would you love to learn? Why?
   I’d like to try archery. If nothing else, it would come in handy in a zombie apocalypse.

10. Who’s your favourite mathematician?
    Alan Turing. He made important contributions to computer science and he helped fight the Nazis.

Thanks Margaret!

Typically, we publish a “Meet Your Developers” profile, where you can get an inside look at the lives of our developers. Today, we’re excited to bring you something a little different, a glimpse into the life of Maple Product Manager, Samir Khan.

Let's get right to it.

1. What do you do at Maplesoft?

I’m 50% of the product management team for Maple. I act as an interface between our developers, mathematicians, marketing, sales, and users.

I spend a lot of time speaking to current and potential customers – this is the most important part of my job.

At the beginning of each development cycle, I work with the developers to put together a list of proposed features. Then, during the year, I try to keep development on track to meet the proposed goals and provide continual feedback.

I also develop applications that demonstrate Maple’s functionality in new and different ways (most are on the Application Center).

2. What did you study in school?

I studied Chemical Engineering.

3. What area(s) of Maple are you currently focusing on in your development?

While I don’t do any direct development of Maple features, I sometimes prototype code as a proof of concept. The developers then look at me with a sense of disdain, tear my prototype apart, and rewrite my code from the ground up.

4. What’s the coolest feature of Maple that you’ve had a hand in developing?

While I generally don’t develop any production code, I’ve been responsible for driving the ThermophysicalData package forward

5. What do you like most about working at Maplesoft? How long have you worked here?

I’ve worked at Maplesoft since 2008. It’s a cliché, but I like the people first and foremost.

I also like the flexibility of my role. Within reason, I can devote part of my time doing things that I think will benefit the company. For example, I get to write lots of applications about subjects that interest me (usually thermodynamics or chemistry).

6. Favourite hobby?

I gave up all my hobbies when kids appeared on the scene. Before that, I wrote spreadsheets for financial modeling

Now, I like to do home science experiments with my son. Yesterday, I mixed yeast with hydrogen peroxide to demonstrate an exothermic reaction.

7. What do you like on your pizza?

Pineapple and mushrooms.

8. What’s your favourite movie?

I don’t really have a single favourite movie, but these movies that have the greatest impact on me over the last few years

• Interstellar
• Annihilation
• Dunkirk
• The Witch
• Frozen (yes, really)

9. What skill would you love to learn? (That you haven’t already) Why?

I want to learn how to juggle to amuse my kids. However, I don’t have the hand-eye coordination to be any good

10. Who’s your favourite mathematician?

That’s a really dreary question.

Instead, I’ll answer two completely different questions.

• My favorite kids TV show is Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom
• I usually listen to Slayer on the drive into work

Thanks Samir!

We’re kicking off 2018 right, with another Meet Your Developers interview! This edition comes from Erik Postma, Manager of the Mathematical Software Group.

To catch up on previous interviews, search the “meet-your-developers” tag.

Without further ado…

1. What do you do at Maplesoft?
   I’m the manager of the mathematical software group, a team of 7 mathematicians and computer scientists working on the mathematical algorithms in Maple (including myself). So my work comes in two flavours: I do the typical managerial things, involving meetings to plan new features and solve my team’s day to day problems, and in the remaining time I do my own development work.
    
2. What did you study in school?
   I studied at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The first year, I took a combined program of mathematics and computer science; then for the rest of my undergrad, I studied mathematics. The program was called Applied Mathematics, but with the specialization I took it really wasn’t all that applied at all. Afterwards I continued in the PhD program at the same university, where my thesis was on a subject in abstract algebra (Lie algebras over finite fields).
    
3. What area(s) of Maple are you currently focusing on in your development?
   I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past two years making the facilities for working with units of measurement in Maple easier to use. There is a very powerful package for doing this that has been part of Maple for many years, but we keep hearing from our users it’s difficult to use. So I’ve worked on keeping the power of the package but making it easier to use.
    
4. What’s the coolest feature of Maple that you’ve had a hand in developing?
   This was actually working on a problem in a part of the code that existed long before I started with Maplesoft. We have a very clever algorithm for drawing random numbers according to a custom, user-specified probability distribution. I wrote about it on MaplePrimes in a series of four blog posts, here. I’ve talked at various workshops and the like about this algorithm and how it is implemented in Maple.
    
5. What do you like most about working at Maplesoft? How long have you worked here?
   I love working at the crossroads of mathematics and computer science; there aren’t many places in the world where you can do that as much as at Maplesoft. But the best thing is the people I work with: us mathematicians are all crazy in slightly different ways, and that makes for a very interesting working environment.
    
6. Favourite hobby?
   Ultimate frisbee. I captain a mixed (i.e., coed) team called The Clockwork. (We play in orange jerseys – it references the book/movie A Clockwork Orange.) We play in a couple of local leagues, and some of the other members also work here. We don’t win much – but we work hard and have fun!
    
7. What do you like on your pizza?
   Mushrooms. Mushrooms on everything!
    
8. What’s your favourite movie?
   Probably Black Book, a dark movie about the Dutch resistance in the second world war from 2006, directed by Paul Verhoeven. I think what I like best about it is that it highlights the moral shades of grey in even so morally elevated a group as the resistance.
    
9. What skill would you love to learn? Why?
   I’d love to learn to speak Russian! I’m trying, but I have a very hard time with it. It would allow me to communicate with my in-laws more easily; they speak Russian.
    
10. Who’s your favourite mathematician?
    Oh, so many to choose from! I’m torn between:

• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), known as the first programmer.
• Felix Klein (1849-1925), driving force behind a lot of research into geometries and their underlying symmetry groups.
• Wilhelm Killing (1847-1923), a secondary school teacher who made big contributions to the theory of Lie algebras.

Or wait, can I choose my wife?

Many of you enjoyed our profile on one of our developers, Paulina Chin, so we’re happy to bring you another one!

Today, we’ll be talking with John May, Senior Developer of Maple. Let’s get started.

1. What do you do at Maplesoft?
   Until recently I was consulting on-site at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory helping people there more effectively solve their engineering problems using Maplesoft products.  But my main job that I am back to full time now is the development and maintenance of various parts of the Maple library.
    
2. What did you study in school?
   I studied both Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of Oregon,  focusing a lot on Abstract Algebra.  In graduate school, I specialized more in computation mathematics like computer algebra and numerical analysis.  My Ph.D. work focused on effective numerical algorithms for problems in polynomial algebra – with implementations in Maple!
    
3. What area(s) of Maple are you currently focusing on in your development?
   Right now I am focused on addressing complaints I’ve gotten from engineers about the usability of units with other parts of the math library.
    
4. What’s the coolest feature of Maple that you’ve had a hand in developing?
   A lot of the cool things I’ve built live pretty deep in the internals of Maple.  I’ve done a lot of meta-heuristic tuning to seamlessly integrate high-performance libraries into top-level Maple commands.
   
   I had a lot of fun developing a lot of the stuff for manipulation and visualization of colors in the ColorTools package.
    
5. What do you like most about working at Maplesoft? How long have you worked here?
   I started working at Maple in 2007, but I’ve been a Maple user since 1997.  I love being part of the magic that brings powerful algorithmic mathematics to everyone.  The R&D team is also full of eccentric nerds who are great fun to work with.
    
6. Favourite hobby?
   It varies by the season, but right now it is prime for mountain biking in southern California.  I ride my local trails a couple times a week, and when I get I chance, I love to get away on epic bikepacking adventures (like this one: https://www.bikemag.com/features/two-wheeled-escape-one-hour-from-l-a/  this is me: https://cdn.bikemag.com/uploads/2016/05/16File.jpg ).
    
7. What do you like on your pizza?
   Anything and everything. Something different every time. My all-time favorite pie my from grad school days is the “Rio Rancho” from the dearly departed That’s Amore Pizza (which was next to the comic book store and across the street from North Carolina State University).  It was an olive oil and mozzarella pizza with chopped bacon that was covered in sliced fresh roma tomatoes and drizzled with ranch dressing when it came out of the oven. 
    
8. What’s your favourite movie?
   It’s really hard to pick just one.  So, I’ll go with the safe answer and say the greatest movie of all time, and “Weird Al” Yankovic’s only foray into movies, UHF, is my favorite.
   http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/
    
9. What skill would you love to learn? (That you haven’t already) Why?
   Another hard one.  I feel like I’ve dabbled in lots of things that I would like to get better at.  At the top of the list is probably unicycling.  I’d love to get good enough to play Unicyle Football or do Muni (mountain unicyling).
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_unicycling
   http://www.unicyclefootball.com/
    
10. Who’s your favourite mathematician?
    Batman. https://youtu.be/AcMEckOyoaM

We’re so excited to bring you guys #MapleOfficeHours! This is a program we’ve designed for students (but open to everyone) to connect via social media for help with Maple. Maple can play a really important part in your courses and can sometimes be intimidating for new users. We get it, there’s a lot of ground to cover. With #MapleOfficeHours, we will use social media as a live Q&A platform to help you figure out how to use Maple for your homework, assignments and more. Having trouble with a command or function? #MapleOfficeHours. Need help finding a specific resource or app? #MapleOfficeHours. You get the idea…

Just like the office hours your professors hold, #MapleOfficeHours is going to be available on a regular basis for support. More events will be scheduled soon, but look out for Twitter chats, mini-webinars, Facebook live events and more. Once we get going, we’d love to hear your feedback on what other types of events we can offer and what topics you’d like to see covered.

Our first #MapleOfficeHours event will be a live Twitter chat. On October 16^th at 2PM EDT, I will be joined with Maple Product Manager, @DanielSkoog and Tech Support Team Lead, Dr. Matt Calder to answer as many questions about Maple that we can possibly fit into an hour’s time.

To join the Twitter chat, use the hashtag #MapleOfficeHours when posting your questions and/or mention us with @maplesoft.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at our first #MapleOfficeHours event on October 16^th, 2PM EDT!