Chip Overclock® is a megalomaniacal supervillain and the secret identity, pseudonym, alter ego, and registered trademark of John Sloan, a technology product developer who writes software and firmware for very large and very small systems on the internet of interesting things: distributed, real-time, high performance, high reliability, embedded, concurrent, parallel, asynchronous, bleeding edge, high altitude, close to bare metal. John has worked in the supercomputing, telecommunications, business aviation, big science, enterprise, industrial, academic, defense, and intelligence domains.
John founded the Digital Aggregates Corporation® for his open source work and his consulting practice, and Cranequin LLC for his closed source and otherwise proprietary work. He writes a blog under his pseudonym on the business and technology of software development to entertain his friends. John has co/authored an article in the Proceedings of the IEEE, an entry in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science, and many conference papers and technical reports. He is the co/inventor of two patents. John has served on industry and academic advisory panels, has been an invited conference speaker, and has served as a visiting scientist and consultant domestically and abroad. John has worked with remote engineering teams in such exotic locales as China, India, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, England, and New Jersey.
John has written hundreds of thousands of lines of code in C and C++ for products that shipped, but has also written production code in Java, Python, JavaScript, FORTRAN, COBOL, IBM 360/370 and PDP-11 assembly languages and a smattering of others, and has noodled around in Go and Rust. He has written low-level and real-time code for products ranging from huge, internationally distributed, telecommunications systems, to supercomputers, to tiny microcontrollers. His work has given him the excuse to use oscilloscopes and logic analyzers and other expensive tools, crawl around in the equipment bays of business jets, spend his days working inside a SCIF, play with GPS, Iridium, and Inmarsat satellites, hack Android phone internals, develop protocol stacks for cellular base stations, wander around the computer room of a supercomputer center at a national lab, sit tangled in cables and fibers on the floor of a big corporate telecom center, teach classrooms full of undergraduate and graduate students, give many successful executive presentations, and travel around the U.S., Europe, and Asia. His favorite part of his career is how many smart and gracious people he has worked with who were so generous with their time and expertise in order to mentor him.
Due perhaps to his broad skill set, John has been described by former managers as "a renaissance man" and as "unfocused".
John lives in the Denver Colorado metro area with his long-time spousal unit and his beloved feline lab assistants.
In the event of his death, John's GitHub successor is his friend and colleague Matt Kocsis https://github.com/mkocsis.
John has been through the U.S. federal government's SSBI (a.k.a. Tier 5 or T5) process more than once.
Contact: mailto:coverclock@diag.com
Head Shot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1b77xmooogcbtlc/HeadShot2.jpg
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsloan/
Web Site: http://www.diag.com
Blog: https://coverclock.blogspot.com
Repositories: https://github.com/coverclock
Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k8k2m4ud9z0lgho/Resume.pdf
- AI applications in software development, safety critical systems, weapons systems. 1
- API design. 2
- Ballroom, swing, and latin dancing. 1
- As difficult as that is to believe.
- Bar codes. 2
- Data traffic management and rate control. 2
- Defense industrial policy.
- Economics, including Game Theory, leveraging market forces, and failures in incentive systems. 1
- Education and especially self-directed learning. 2
- Fashion. 1
- No, seriously.
- Fermi Paradox.
- I spend more time than I should worrying about the Fermi Paradox.
- Geolocation and its applications, like precision agriculture. 2
- Hardware entropy generation. 2
- Linux kernel and GNU C library APIs. 2
- Mass storage systems. 2
- Multi/inter-modal shipping, and shipping containers. 1
- Real-time, concurrent, parallel, and asynchronous systems. 2
- Relativity and quantum mechanics.
- I find the experimental verification of Bell's Theorem deeply troubling.
- Safety Science, and analysis of failures in complex systems. 1
- Satellite communications systems, like Iridium and Inmarsat. 2
- Maybe someday Starlink.
- Time and frequency metrology, and precision time and frequency references. 2
- Trains, both freight and passenger, and mass transit. 1
- Unidentified anomalous phenomena in any domain.
- I'm a skeptic, but a very few such phenomena may be foreign intelligence assets.