In this episode, Bryce and Conor continue with part two of their interview with father and son Otto and Eric Niebler!

About the Guests:

Eric Niebler is a Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA where he is the technical lead for their core C++ libraries. He started programming at the age of 13 on the IBM XT his Dad brought home in 1986. He then decided he hated computers when he realized his Dad wanted him to like them. It wouldn’t be until college that Eric decided computers were all right after all.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Eric starting programming professionally in 1996 for Microsoft. It was during this time he developed his irrational and inexplicable love of C++. That love eventually carried him away from Microsoft and to independent consulting with Boost.org and BoostPro Computing. Around the same time, Eric got involved in the ISO Standardization process, a relationship that continues to this day.

He wrote and (sometimes) maintains the popular range-v3 library, which became the basis for C++20’s std::range (also Eric’s contribution). These days, Eric spends his time trying to give standard C++ an honest-to-god async programming model and a suite of generic async algorithms that can work on any execution context.

Otto Niebler was born 1936 in the south Bronx to immigrant parents from Germany. In 1954, he started at Fordham University. In 1956, he dropped out to get a career in “computers” after a classmate introduced him to “data processing” and the UNIVAC 90. Later that year, Otto got a job with Benjamin Moore Paints operating their Univac 80 shop and then later worked at the Remington Rand Service bureau.

After 3 years of operations, he realized that success in this industry would require a college degree. There were no “computer science” degrees then so he pursued a math degree which is what he received from Columbia University by 1961. He did this while simultaneously working full time as a DP manager at on Wall Street.

Upon graduation in 1961, he was recruited and hired by Remington Rand Univac as technical engineer member of a sales team. In 1964, he went to General Electric in the same capacity that he had at Univac, technical support for marketing where he specialized in the GE 400 line. In 1967, he joined NYSE SIAC as a program manager responsible for automating their ticker.

From 1971 to 2001, he went to IBM where he held a vareity of roles: application programmer specializing in Wall Street applications; technical support of marketing to Wall Street accounts; regional specialist in data base (DB2) and Capacity Planning; systems engineering manager specializing in large scale installations; consultant in disaster recovery. His final two years were teaching disaster recovery planning to consultants in a distance learning context before remote learning became fashionable.

Show Notes

Date Recorded: 2021-12-02
Date Released: 2022-01-07

Intro Song Info

Miss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusic
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