About

About the Author: Lammert Bies is a dad, husband and polyglot. He is developing embedded systems since the eighties. Used machine learning before it had a name. Specializes in interconnecting computers, robots and humans. Was a Google Mapmaker Advocate and speaker on several international Google conferences from 2011 until the plug was pulled on Mapmaker in 2017. Bughunter with Google. Currently spreading artificial intelligence to the wildest locations in production environments. He never stops learning.

Lammert Bies, the man behind this site, was born more than half a century ago. His first encounter with computers was with an 8bit TRS-80 clone, soon to be replaced with a 16bit MS-DOS based computer. The early years were a rough ride switching between multi-user systems based on VMS, and BSD and single user systems with CP/M and MS-DOS. He was amazed that you could run 20 clocks on one screen simultaneously on a PC with 512kB of RAM running the then new Windows 1.03 software. Ever since that moment he has thought of computers as devices to run tasks in parallel, rather than in sequence.

His first big projects were fully automating a hydraulic press and a multi-line voice response system on Windows. Although in entirely different industries, the projects shared reliability, performance, versatility and cutting edge algorithms as their core values. Part of that code-base is still used unaltered today in production. When working on location he often needed a reliable resource with information about interfacing all types of devices. Without any such resource available, he decided in 1996 to create his own, this website, which still exists today and has served millions of visitors around the world with valuable information.

With a lot of mission critical projects in between, Lammert is now focusing on industrial applications for high speed weighing, measuring, grading and sorting products in production lines, often incorporating artificial intelligence. His software is parallel en redundant by design and runs on several hardware platforms for the best reliability and lifespan. While originally programming mainly in C, he currently develops large parts in Go, a native compiled language with the performance of C, but a built-in unmatched support for parallelism.

Born in the Netherlands and now mainly back there, he spent part of his life in Kazakhstan, following the love of his life. Despite the remote rural location there, he continued his work in the automation field and adapted to a fully remote working environment to serve his clients abroad. Besides his development work, he worked as a Google Mapmaker Advocate to get Kazakhstan on the map, and found some security bugs in the process.