Zeke Hoskin
Programmer-Analyst
This Is Not A Resume


But this is.
My real resume
My home page

I am currently retired, after spending most of my working career herding bytes. At the C.U.C.B.C. I wrote Access applications, helped people with Excel spreadsheets, and maintained APL applications. I spent far too much of my time and energy trying to figure out how to make Windows applications do what my clients want instead of what Microsoft thinks I should want.

I started out doing a physics and math degree at Acadia University and followed that up with a Masters in radiation biophysics at the University of Calgary. It turned out that there was very little work in my field, so I took a few math and computing courses at Simon Fraser University. I learned APL from Ted Edwards, one of the greats, and worked for seven years at I. P. Sharp Associates, an APL timesharing company.

The bottom fell out of the timesharing business in 1985, and IPSA held a mass layoff. I spent a few years as a consultant moving my old timesharing customers to PCs and did another Masters at Simon Fraser, writing the microcode for an APL-running chip set being developed by Rick Hobson. I hung around SFU as a research assistant until 1991, then worked for half a year at the Dept of Environment weather service implementing a voicemail climate information system in Paradox.

In 1992 I started at the Credit Union Central of BC to support a new Treasury system and a bunch of old APL applications. I ended up writing most of a database system in Excel 4 macro language. Since then worked mostly in Access, except when I got to add something to the APL apps, still running and still working every time.

Probably the weirdest thing I've done (involving computers) was a simple C swat-the-flies game. After you stopped playing and got back to work, flies would zip up from the bottom of the screen and improve the user interest of whatever application was running.