Arthur J. O'Dwyer

You are seeing this page through the efforts of the good people in the CMU Computer Club.

What I Do

I'm currently working on DNS server code at Akamai.
Before that, I was one of the first few systems engineers at Mixpanel, where I wrangled terabytes of data and generally kept things running smoothly.
Before that, I worked for MemSQL, making the world's fastest distributed SQL database.
Before that, I worked for Green Hills Software, making the world's most optimizing C compiler.
Examine my résumé [PDF, 71K] for more details. [TeX source]

My hobbies include:

• Programming. This is a big one, of course. I have done interesting things related to the TI-83 and the esoteric Fungus virtual machine.
• Specifically, C++. I speak at conferences, organize the Bay Area C++ meetup, and in 2017 I published my first book, Mastering the C++17 STL.
• Juggling. I particularly enjoy club-passing patterns. In fact, I've written a program to animate them.
• Euro board gaming. Some of my favorite titles: Race for the Galaxy, Ora et Labora, Resistance: Avalon.
• Binary Homeworlds, a chess-like game played with Looney Pyramids. I've written an AI to play Homeworlds.
• Movies, particularly classic and horror.
• Crosswords. At CMU I wrote crosswords for the student newspaper, The Tartan (in addition to being chief copy editor). I've written several crossword utilities.

These days, whenever I do something big as a hobby project, I try to put it up on GitHub. So that's a good place to look at what I've been doing lately. Most recently, I ported several versions of the classic Fortran game "Adventure" to the Z-machine.

I'm looking for one particular lost version of "Adventure"; if you see it, please contact me!

Contact Me

Free Things

Here is where I store some stuff that is free. If you like something that you see here, please feel free to take it and make it yours. But still free. Thanks.

Free software

• Crossword utilities, which I have used in creating crosswords for The Tartan. Includes a crossword dictionary.
• detab, an entab/detab utility.
• ImageFmtc.h (.c), a very simple and I think user-friendly interface to various flavors of the BMP, PGM, and PPM image formats. Also converts between RGB and grayscale very easily.
• quine, a little program that tries to generate a "quining" function for any given C program. Produces 100% portable ISO C.
• Capture Pentominoes, an abstract board game of my own devising.
• Fungus, the Befunge machine; and its two-dimensional assembler; based on a specification by Alexios Chouchoulas.

Images

• The logo of the CMU Math Club, composed using METAFONT. [METAFONT source, 4K]
• A PBM parody of the logo for the PNG image format. Makes a good desktop image. [Zipped BMP, 31K]
• A Nethack version of the Calvin Klein logo.

Other Things

• Take a look at my Knuth reward checks!
• Buy something I've published! (Amazon links will appear in the lower right, if you turn off AdBlock.)

Documents: copyright someone else

• A revised version [PDF, 117K] of Joseph H. Silverman's C Reference Card. [TeX source]
• The FAQ [HTML, 81K] (Frequently Asked Questions) for the newsgroup alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++, mirrored from http://www.snurse-l.org/acllc-c++/faq.html.
• Index of /~ajo/disseminate. This is stuff that I want to disseminate to people. It is not necessarily in the public domain, nor will it stick around for more than six months in most cases. Use at your own risk.

Links: not here

• You can go here for a whole page of links to things I like.