My name is Gordon Tisher; I live in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

I am a software developer by trade and I enjoy studying languages and linguistics on the side.

I am married to an excellent woman by the name of Andrea, and we have two children.

I grew up in Liberia, and have lived in and traveled to a wide variety of places.

Things I’m interested in

Computing

I have worked in computational linguistics (pre deep learning) and played around with NLP using deep learning.
I’ve built compilers for .NET and using LLVM.
I’ve helped build AAA video games and in tiny VR startups.
I’ve paid the bills with a lot of full-stack web app development.

My resume is here, and my GitHub profile is @chalcolith.

Some projects to highlight:

I spent almost ten years as a core member of the Pony programming language team; Pony is an open-source, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language.
Kiuatan: a packrat parser generator for Pony that can handle left recursion.
An unpublished compiler for scripting in a massive distributed VR engine.

I have a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics. I’ve studied and forgotten numerous languages.

I like to keep up some classical Greek; I translated the Gospel of Mark into English in a rather idiosyncratic fashion.

I sang in choirs in university, and have sung in various community choirs since then.

I was for fifteen years a member of the Abendmusik Vesper Choir.

I was most recently in the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra Chorus. I’ve done a bit of classical solo work around Kamloops.

I’ve always been an aviation geek. Health issues put a stop to my flight training, but I fire up MSFS from time to time.

I have a Canadian advanced drone license.