David A. Thomas, sometimes known as "Big" Dave Thomas is a software developer, researcher and entrepreneur. He was founder and CEO of

Object Technology International Object Technology International (OTI) was founded in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) in 1988 and acquired by IBM in 1996. OTI, in conjunction with the IBM development lab in Cary, NC, developed the VisualAge line Smalltalk and Java development tools th ...

, which created the products that became

IBM VisualAge VisualAge is a family of computer integrated development environments from IBM, which supports multiple programming languages. VisualAge was first released in October 1993 and was discontinued April 30, 2007 and its web page removed in September ...

and eventually

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ce ...

. He has taught and researched at universities in Canada and Australia, and advises R&D teams in

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

and fast data,

agile software development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...

, and object technology. Thomas was the CEO and Chairman of YOW! conferences and workshops until the business was acquired by Skills Matter in 2020.

Career

Carleton University

David A. Thomas completed a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at

Carleton University Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning World ...

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

, Canada in 1969, and a Master of Systems and Computer Engineering there in 1976. From 1969, he has had a long history of involvement with computing services and research at Carleton, and was appointed an assistant professor and then a professor in 1990. To this day, Thomas is an adjunct professor at Carleton. In 1984, Thomas started and led the Object Oriented Research Group at Carleton with colleagues Wilf LaLonde and John Pugh. The group created a range of tools for development in the

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

language including ENVY/Smalltalk (an IDE), ENVY/Developer (a team programming and configuration management tool for Smalltalk) and Orwell (a

revision control system Revision Control System (RCS) is an early implementation of a version control system (VCS). It is a set of UNIX commands that allow multiple users to develop and maintain program code or documents. With RCS, users can make their own revisions of ...

Object Technology International

In 1988, Thomas founded the company Object Technology International, based in Ottawa, to commercialize the products. He was CEO of the company until its eventual acquisition. An early project was an embedded Smalltalk for

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

oscilloscope An oscilloscope (informally a scope) is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying electrical voltages as a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time. The main purposes are to display repetiti ...

s, developed jointly with Tektronix, Digitalk, and the Canadian

Department of National Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to: Current departments of defence * Department of Defence (Australia) * Department of National Defence (Canada) * Department of Defence (Ireland) * Department of National Defense (Philippin ...

. OTI were engaged to help create IBM's

VisualAge VisualAge is a family of computer integrated development environments from IBM, which supports multiple programming languages. VisualAge was first released in October 1993 and was discontinued April 30, 2007 and its web page removed in September ...

Smalltalk. In 1996 OTI was acquired by IBM, and the VisualAge range became IBM products. VisualAge Java was the basis for the first release of the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Eclipse IDE Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It is the second-most-popular IDE for Java development, and, un ...

. Thomas left IBM in 1998. He spent several years in academia at Carleton, and the Australian universities

University of Queensland , mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work , established = , endowment = A$224.3 million , budget = A$2.1 billion , type = Public research university , chancellor = Peter Varghese , vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry , city = B ...

and

Queensland University of Technology Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a public research university located in the urban coastal city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. QUT is located on two campuses in the Brisbane area viz. Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove. The univ ...

Agile, Big Data, Fast Data

Thomas has guided several startups in Big Data and Fast Data, includin
kx
His own R&D operation in Ottawa, Bedarra Labs, is now the R&D arm of First Derivatives plc, kx's parent company.

YOW conferences

Thomas was part of the organizing committees for

OOPSLA OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) is an annual ACM research conference. OOPSLA mainly takes place in the United States, while the sister conference of OOPSLA, ECOOP, is typically held in Europe. It is opera ...

ECOOP The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), is an annual conference covering topics on object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications. Like other conferences, ECOOP offers various tracks and many simultaneous ...

, and the Danish Java and Object Oriented (JAOO) conferences for many years. In 2008, he brought a conference much like JAOO to Australia. English speakers tended to spell out the acronym, while Danes and Germans pronounced the name "Yow". As the conference became less Java-oriented, the decision was made to remove all doubt and call it simply YOW. In Europe, JAOO was renamed GOTO conference in 2011. There are now Yow conferences and other events every year in several Australian and Asian cities. The business was sold to Skills Matter in 2020, and then in 2022 YOW was acquired by Trifork, the organiser of the GOTO conferences in Europe.

Awards

Thomas was awarded the title of Distinguished Engineer by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

(ACM) in 2008.

Publications

''Smalltalk With Style'' Klimas, Edward J., Thomas, David A. and Skublics, Suzanne, Prentice Hall, NJ 1996

References

External links

kx SystemsFD LabsYow Conferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thomas, David A. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian software engineers