 I currently work for Groove Networks in Beverly, MA. I started working here in October 1999, when the company was still in stealth mode. Initially I worked in the Application Framework group under Eric Patey. After we shipped 1.0 I started thinking about what else we could do with this stuff. Matt Pope and I had this wacky idea that we should try to work with PDAs. I thought that this would be a fun area to work in because I'd have to write really efficient code again, and I was getting fed up with the size of Windows applications, (including Groove) and I wanted to get back to the black art of making code really efficient. This initiative has now become what we are calling Groove Web Services. It has a lot less to do with PDAs and much more to do with extending the Groove platform to any device.
Before coming to Groove I was a founder of the now extinct company, GameFX. We were a spin off from now extinct 3Dfx. Our goal was to design games for 3D accelerators from the ground up. Some of our initial demos blew people's minds. We would show some of our engine and people would say stuff like, "Yeah that's pretty but do you have anything that's not pre-rendered?". Now these types of games are pretty commonplace. Every body is writing for hardware. Why wouldn't you?
And before that little venture I was a programmer in the technology group at the now extinct (seeing a pattern here?) Looking Glass Technologies. I showed up there about a month or two before Seamus Blakely quit to go work for Dreamworks. Looking Glass was a great company and an incredible group of people. We wrote DOS games and we squeezed every ounce of juice we could out of them. We published Flight Unlimited, System Shock, and Terra Nova. I mostly worked on Terra Nova on all the audio mixing code. Nobody has ever played that game - I think we sold something like 30,000 copies. But it was voted 13th of the top 100 games ever by PC Gamer magazine one year. The reviewer said something like:
"You fools! Why didn't you buy this game? This is the game you've been asking someone to make and they finally did it and you didn't buy it!!"
Sigh. Those were the good old days. Now I don't even play computer games. I spend all my time trying to get my 9 year old son to stop playing them and finish his homework. I don't remember having so much homework when I was 9 years old.
So that's my professional life, sort of. I am also an amateur bike racer for NEBC and I run their website. I'm a client of Cycle-Smart, so I'm following a very strict training program. Chris McDonald is my coach. Its been great working with him. I'm hoping to upgrade to the next USCF category this year so I can ride with some of the really fast guys.
I live in Arlington, MA with my wonderful wife Kristin Phillips and our two kids, Jeremy and Claire.
© Copyright 2003 John Burkhardt.
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