Philip Greenspun - Biography

Biography

Greenspun was born on September 28, 1963, grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and received an S.B. in Mathematics from MIT in 1982. After working for Hewlett Packard Research Labs in Palo Alto and Symbolics, he became a founder of ICAD, Inc. Greenspun returned to MIT to study electrical engineering and computer science, eventually receiving a Ph.D.

Among software engineers, Greenspun is known for his Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

In 1993, Greenspun founded photo.net, an online community for people helping each other to improve their photographic skills. He seeded the community with Travels with Samantha, a photo-illustrated account of a trip from Boston to Alaska and back. photo.net, having grown to 600,000 registered users, was acquired by NameMedia in 2007 for $6 million, according to documents filed in connection with a planned public offering of NameMedia shares (news story).

Greenspun released the software behind photo.net as a free open-source toolkit called the ArsDigita Community System, built on top of the Oracle relational database management system. He wrote several textbooks on developing Internet applications, including Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, SQL for Web Nerds, and Software Engineering for Internet Applications, the textbook for an MIT course. Greenspun started a company to sell support and service contracts for the toolkit, which remained free, and grew ArsDigita to about $20 million in revenue before taking a venture capital investment (story).

Greenspun was an early developer of database-backed Web sites, which became the dominant approach to engineering sites with user contributions, e.g., Amazon.com. Greenspun was a developer of one of the first Web-based electronic medical record systems (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC116301/ "Building national electronic medical record systems via the World Wide Web."). Greenspun's Oracle-based community site LUSENET was an important early host of free forums. In 1995, Greenspun was hired to lead development of Hearst Corporation's Internet services, which included some early e-commerce sites.

According to the FAA Airmen registry, Greenspun holds an Airline Transport Pilot License and Flight Instructor certificates for both airplanes and helicopters, as well as type ratings for two turbojet-powered airplanes. Greenspun is listed as an instructor at East Coast Aero Club and was interviewed by NPR regarding the success of a Groupon helicopter lesson offer ("Half-Off Cupcakes And More").

Greenspun and his co-founders started a non-profit foundation that ran the ArsDigita Prize, an award for young web developers, and the ArsDigita University, a tuition-free one-year program teaching the core computer science curriculum, one course at a time.

Greenspun has taught electrical engineering and computer science at MIT ("Teaching Software Engineering"). One of Greenspun's most famous students is Randal Pinkett, who built an online community for low-income housing residents in Greenspun's 6.171 Software Engineering for Internet Applications course. Pinkett went on to win NBC TV show The Apprentice. In 2003, Greenspun helped teach a newly designed circuits and electronics course at MIT.

In 2007, Greenspun donated $20,000 to Wikimedia Foundation to start a fund for the payment of illustrators to supply illustrations for use on Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Greenspun is a volunteer for Angel Flight and, on December 6, 2010, assisted in the first nationally arranged kidney paired-donation in which kidneys were flown from Lebanon, New Hampshire to St. Louis and vice versa (source).

In January 2011 and again in January 2012, Greenspun taught an intensive RDBMS/SQL programming course at MIT using Google Docs to coordinate classroom instruction.