About John Deacon

Profile

In previous lives, I was a chemistry graduate (Manchester University) and a cost and management accountant before encountering my first recalcitrant computer -- an IBM System 32 -- in 1979. Since then I have programmed, designed, analyzed, managed, written about and taught computer systems.

I have worked on machines ranging from embedded systems -- Electronic Point Of Sale for example -- through many commercial uses of micro- and mini-computers -- television, advertising, and accounting systems for example -- to workstations and distributed systems in engineering and scientific computing -- high-energy physics at CERN and other national physics institutes for example, engaging with systems at all levels from frameworks to device drivers and boot code. In the course of these projects I have done most of the jobs in software development: programmer, designer, analyst and project manager.

I have worked in a number of application areas including advertising, accounting, production, on-line reservation, production costing, media and legal systems, and embedded systems including EFTPOS, control, and telecommunications, and operating systems. In the late-80s/early 90s, I was the designer of, and a developer of a CASE tool supporting the Booch object-oriented method.

Although still delivering courses to a variety of for-profit organisations, my training activities over the last fifteen years have focused on the particle physics and astronomy communities, delivering around two hundred courses courses to CERN in Geneva, DESY in Hamburg, Rutherford Appleton in the UK as well as other institutes and observatories around the world.

I was one of the three co-founders of Lattice Limited in 1993. Lattice Limited became Matrice in September 2001.

I was the lead author of Matrice’s UML, OOA&D, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Enterprise Java, CORBA and C# courses.

I am a member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer.

My first book, on Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2004.