Dan Weinreb’s blog

This blog essays about software and computer companies.  There are also book reviews and trip reports.

I’m Dan Weinreb.  You can send me mail at dlw at the host alum.mit.edu.

As an undergrad, I worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (now part of MIT’s CSAIL) on the Lisp machine, a single-user computer (quite novel at the time!) specialized for the Lisp language.  Our team formed a company called Symbolics in 1980, and licensed the Lisp machine technology from MIT.  I was one of the co-founders, and worked on all kinds of things, primary software development.  I was also one of the designers of the Common Lisp language.

In 1988, several of us left Symbolics and joined with a few other people to found Object Design.  Object Design started by producing an object-oriented database system, at the time when the mainstream software world was first starting to use object-oriented programming, due to the coming of C++.  ObjectStore was initially designed for CAD and CASE systems written in C++.  We ended up having a wide range of users, and we added Java support.  Later we made a small DBMS called PSI, and an XML DBMS, and several other products. Object Design (then renamed eXcelon) was bought by Progress Software around 2003, and it’s still going, as their ObjectStore division.

I spent a few years at BEA, as the architect of “Operations, Administration, and Management” of WebLogic server.  They were in the middle of a big release all that time, so I didn’t get to produce much code, but I helped with designs and learned a great deal about transaction processing issues. (BEA has since been bought by Oracle.)

I’m now working full-time at ITA Software, Inc., building an extremely real transaction processing system: a full-functionality airline reservation system, which must meet SLA’s with an uptime of 99.99%.  I help oversee the whole architecture, but mainly focus on the “core” (the business rule layer), which is about 650KLOC of Common Lisp. (Google is going to buy ITA Software.)

I am also a member of Common Angels, the oldest (and best!) angel investing group in the Boston area. I was also the general chair of the International Lisp Conference 2009.

I live in Lexington, Mass, with my wife Cheryl and my son Adam.

I appreciate comments on these blog entries, and will accept any that aren’t rude or hostile.  Please enter comments – I’d love to hear from you!