Larry O'Brien, columnist and contributing editor to SD Times, is the President of Faster Programmers LLC, a consulting company specializing in high-productivity, high-performance software development. An accomplished programmer and software architect in his own right (he is especially interested in programming language design, concurrency, and high-performance computing), Larry is intensely interested in the psychology of software development, especially as it relates to learning new programming skills and the best use of programming tools.

In 1989, Larry was hired by Miller Freeman as the Product Review Editor of Computer Language and AI Expert magazines. He went on to become Editor-in-Chief of both. Eventually Larry became the Editorial Director of the Software Development group at Miller Freeman, during which time he launched Software Development Magazine and Game Developer magazines and the Jolt Awards. During that period, he also programmed what may have been the world’s first profitable website.

Larry left Miller Freeman to launch one of the only Internet companies to go broke in 1997. He became the Vice President of R&D at iMind Education Systems and later held the same position at 10th Dimension. Today, Larry assembles and leads distributed teams of developers using agile techniques that emphasize quality and short turn-around times as the key to delivering high-performance, easy-to-evolve software.

Larry lives on the Big Island of Hawaii and blogs at www.knowing.net.