Westy Rockwell considers himself a world citizen. Currently he is a senior developer at tarent GmbH, a Web development company in Bonn, Germany. His greatest pleasure is enjoying the company of his wife, Zamina, and their two daughters, Joaquina and Jennifer. Somehow, they tolerate his intense involvement with computers.
Westy has more than 15 years of experience as a professional software developer, but his involvement with computers dates back longer yet. In 1965, he programmed the Pythagorean theorem into an IBM 1620 with punched cards. His faculty adviser told him to stop spending so much time on programming, which had no career future. In 1970, while studying IBM 360 programming, he was considered too radical for saying that computers would one day play chess. It was not until the early 1980s, with the arrival of microcomputers, that his career and his passion could merge.
His real software education came from deeply hacking many microcomputers, including the ZX80, the Osborne, the Vic20, the C64, various Amigas, and, of course, IBM PCs. His career, meanwhile, involved him with more respectable software and hardware, including UNIX, workstations, minicomputers, mainframes, and, of course, IBM PCs. Interest in hardware design, along with C and assembly languages, culminated in 1994 when he built the prototype for an extremely successful dual-processor alcohol analyser, including the PCB design, operating system, and application software.
Soon afterward, while developing man-machine interfaces, the pre-release version of Borland Delphi turned Westy into a Windows developer. He went on to work on three-tier systems based on Windows NT, including corporate asset management, document imaging, and work management systems. For more than a year now he has refused to touch SQL or Visual tools, and he is enthusiastically pursuing Web browser- and server-based applications using Java, Tomcat, Xerces, and Xalan.