Gene Callahan has been involved in the computer industry for over three decades.
In the 1980s, he was a core programmer for Managing Your Money, the number one selling personal finance software at that time.
In the early 90s, he built the HyperAwk programming language, allowing users to convert Microsoft Word and Word Perfect documents to hypertext automatically. Based on that experience, he argued for the utility of command line interfaces in his article “Semiotics and GUI Design” (Computer Language), long before that became fashionable.
In the mid-90s, at Value Behavioral Health, Callahan was a pioneer in using Internet technology for sharing data inside a company (an intranet). This work was described in:
- “Developing Your Intranet Strategy,” Software Development, Feb. 1997 (with Cynthia Esposito).
- “Calming the Corporate Immune System,” Software Development, January 2000 (with Gifford Pinchot).
In the early oughts, Callahan built OptionView, an option trading system, for OTA Limited Partnership. It offered real-time analytics on chains of up to hundreds of options, accepted live feeds from four option exchanges, offered the ability to do “what-if” scenarios, and supported the trading of millions of dollars of options per day. The Java code for the project was largely shared between the frontend GUI and a backend caching server, and the system used Java serialization to send cached data and analytics to the client on demand. This work led to the following publications:
- “PropArgs: Every Programmer’s Dream,” Java Developer’s Journal, June, 2000 (with Rob Dodson).
- “A Generic Client-Server Architecture for Java,” Java Developer’s Journal, January, 2000 (with Rob Dodson).
- “Clarify Your Code in the Functional Style,” Java Developer’s Journal, April, 1999 (with Rob Dodson).
After completing that project, Callahan took a break from software engineering, completing a masters degree at the London School of Economics, and a PhD at Cardiff University. His PhD thesis was published as the book Oakeshott on Rome and America.
Callahan subsequently taught economics, mathematics, and computer science at Purchase College, Saint Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, and New York University. At NYU he developed one of the first university-level DevOps courses. During this time he wrote the agent-based modeling system Indra, and continues to write on computer topics, for Cutter IT Journal and Computing Reviews. He was selected a “Reviewer of the Month” at Computing Reviews in January, 2022.