Frank Warmerdam

I am an independent software developer, available on contract for writing geospatial data translators. See my resume if you might be interested.

I am also the primary developer of the open source GDAL/OGR geospatial data access library. I am also currently serving as Treasurer of OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. It is an umbrella organization for GDAL/OGR and a variety of other geospatial software projects.

I graduated the University of Waterloo with a BMath, majoring in Computer Science. I am a Linux user and an avid supporter of Open Source. I am also a big Rush fan.

My sister, Lisa White, has obtained her masters from the University of Toronto. Her husband, Shannon White works at RIM. My mother Phyllis Warmerdam is webmaster of her Dragon Boat team The Breast Buddies. My father, Art Warmerdam is a retired farmer.

I am father of two great kids. Adrian William Warmerdam is our son, and was born Feb. 25, 1995. I have pictures of him at 4 months, about 3 1/2 and at 4 1/2. Our second child, Valerie Elizabeth Warmerdam was born April 13th, 1997. Valerie loves to sing.

In late 2005 our family moved to a house in the country. 2010 finds me divorcing my first wife Nathalie (my fault), and moving into a new home in Eganville. Nathalie continues to live at the country house with the kids alternating weekly.

The following are some topics that I think might be of general interest. Think of the list as memes trying to reproduce.

• Joel Spolsky explains why we need to learn more and more every years as developers, despite the apparent protection of high level abstractions in The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I couldn't agree more with the dangers of learning high level abstractions without understanding what underlies them well enough to recover when the abstraction leaks.
• Worse is better, and Hive or Corporate?.
• I believe that the strongest software, is the software with the most interactive user communinity, ideally a community that becomes co-developers. This is clearly analyzed in the The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond.
• People often ask why we shouldn't re-write this or that package from scratch to be object-oriented (or "better" in some other way), to which I now like to refer them to Rewrites Considered Harmful?.
• I occationally contributed to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to.
• If you have some time, you might want to read One Regret by professor Prabhakar Ragde. I never had much interaction with him in University, though I knew him by reputation. However, his very personal essay moved me, and made me think a bit about uses of the web, personal web space, and about life experiences.
• Do you ever feel Burned Out?

Email: warmerdam@pobox.com
Phone: (650) 701-7823
Snail Mail: 225 Pamela Drive, Unit #212, Mountain View, CA, 94040, USA