Software's whipping boy

Robin was born to hippies at home near 24th & Friendly street, Eugene, Oregon. His first job was in molecular biology. He moved to Chicago to be a true academic with disdain for engineers, got over that, worked in the financial sector, missed the mountains and ocean too much and moved to California where he worked on B2B applications, Linux, and streaming media. After a move to Munich Robin learned that one of his compatriots in bringing Linux to the masses had a new idea for helping people enjoy the Internet, and he found his way to Flock.

Robin's favorite thing is a software tool: the spreadsheet. "The spreadsheet is the only successful programming tool for the general populace. For decades people tried to invent a visual tool that makes it easy for people to create a program to show their ideas. But it hasn't happened: programming is hard, not because you have to learn a secret language, but because the process of formalizing your thoughts is hard. The spreadsheet makes it easy. You can think of the world as a bunch of little boxes and build relationships between those boxes, re-sorting them when you want to. You can model your shopping list or your project plan, make cryptography code more clear, plan a wedding, compute how much of a house you can afford or the relative benefits of different vacations. Spreadsheets simplify tasks with a metaphor that is easy to understand."

In his free time, Robin enjoys free diving, reading, hiking, cooking, and walking his Schipperke.

Check out Robin's blog.