A friend pointed out that it would be good for me to introduce myself on this blog. I think that is a good idea.
My name is David John Burrowes. Friends call me David.
I have worked in the software industry, largely in the US Silicon Valley, for the last 15 years. For the first 9 years, I worked as a programmer at a variety of companies. I wrote database drivers, data access applications, in-house "mission critical custom applications" (remember that term?), productivity apps and probably some other stuff I can't remember just now. I've written in Pascal, Visual Basic, C, C++, Objective-C, Postscript, Java, on a wide variety of computer platforms.
Several years ago, I transitioned into user interface design, partly because the programming problems were seeming increasingly dull (Wow! Another way to retrieve a row of data from a database! How exciting! Zzzzzzzz), and partially out of an increassing interest in the topic of interface design. (I have a degree in Cognitive Science, so this transition was less extreme than it might seem).
Since that transition time, I have done interface design on productivity applications, system management tools, programming languages, web applications, development tools, command line utilities, and other things. One of the blessings of working at a big company like Sun is that there are a wide variety of things to get experience with.
I've started writing this blog partially to share some of my thoughts about Sun and interface design, as well as a place for me to try to articulate some of the issues involved in the work. It seems increasingly aparent that interface design (or, really, experience design) is going to be more and more important in the future of software, and I'm really interested in finding ways to get this design work better integrated into software products.
In my spare time, outside of work, you'll find me ballroom dancing, learning Mandarin, doing some volunteer work (which has surprising work-related ramifications, since I see completely ordinary people trying to use computers every week), as well as hanging out with friends.