Brian Becker

Brian Paul Becker is the APL Tools Architect at Dyalog Ltd since March 2011. Additionally, he has maintained his own APL consultancy, Blue Dolphin Solutions LLC, since 1983. He has been recognized for his work in APL when he received the New York State Data Processing Association's Award of Excellence, and twice by ACM/SIGAPL for innovative use of APL.

Accomplishments
Becker learned APL in his first year of high school in 1975 and has has spent the majority of time since then working with three APL language purveyors, I.P. Sharp Associates, STSC, and Dyalog Ltd, and several businesses using APL across a wide variety of industries and applications, for example:
 * A long-range financial planning system that helped companies consolidate their charts of accounts when merging.
 * An APL-based source code management system
 * Manufacturing requirements planning systems
 * Voice and data network design tools
 * Applications to track and manage USA Federal legislative and regulatory information
 * An APL-based full-text search engine
 * Electronic medical records management systems
 * Governance, risk, and compliance applications
 * Frameworks that help APL applications run on the web

Becker has twice been recognized by the ACM/SIGAPL for "Innovative Use of APL". First for his systems to maintain online versions of the U.S.C. (United States Code - the body of permanent Federal laws) and the C.F.R (Code of Federal Regulations - the body of regulations for all Federal agencies). These systems were unique in that they not only presented a structural view of the material, but a chronological view as well. Becker's second recognition was for his full-text search engine, originally developed to search the U.S.C. and C.F.R.. This search engine executed searches several orders of magnitude faster than previous solutions.

In the 1990's, Becker contributed to the design of the first user command system and several of his ideas have found their way into various APL implementations. He has been involved with the APL Problem Solving Competition since its inception in 2009, first as a judge and also later as its primary problem content developer. Based on the feedback from the 2011 competition winner, he implemented the first version of TryAPL in 2012.

General subjects

 * Hacking with APL
 * Simply A-maze-ing
 * Isolated Mandelbrot Set Explorer

About solving the 2014 APL Problem Solving Competition

 * How Tweet It Is
 * It’s All Right
 * It’s as easy as 1 1 2 3…

Presentations

 * Dyalog '11 D09: Introducing the APL Tools Group
 * Dyalog '11 C09: Building Secure Applications in Dyalog APL
 * Dyalog '12 D05: Building Web Apps in Dyalog APL
 * Dyalog '12 D13: The Story of tryapl.org (with Morten Kromberg)
 * Dyalog '13 D05: Towards Industrial Strength Web Applications (slides)
 * Dyalog '14 D12: MiServer 3.0 (slides)
 * Dyalog '16 D04: Tools Group Update (with Dan Baronet and Adám Brudzewsky)
 * Dyalog '17 D09: Cross-Platform User Interfaces using the HTMLRenderer (slides)
 * Dyalog '17 D12: Try APL Online (with Adám Brudzewsky) (slides)
 * Dyalog '18 D06: Cross-Platform User Interfaces
 * Dyalog '19 D10: What's New with HTMLRenderer? (slides)
 * Dyalog '21 D10: Packaging Dyalog Tools (slides)

Workshops

 * Dyalog '10 WS1: APL and Web Services – What is a Web Service? (slides)
 * Dyalog '12 C04: Web Applications I (materials)
 * Dyalog '12 C08: Web Applications II (materials)
 * Dyalog '12 C12: Secure Applications (with Bjørn Christensen)
 * Dyalog '13 SA02: Secure Applications (with Bjørn Christensen)
 * Dyalog '13 SP02: Introduction to MiServer
 * Dyalog '13 TP02: MiServer Masterclass
 * Dyalog '14 SA02: Introduction to MiServer 3.0 (slides)
 * Dyalog '14 SP02: The Ins and Outs of Data (with Dan Baronet) (materials)
 * Dyalog '14 TP02: Advanced MiServer 3.0 (slides)
 * Dyalog '15 SA02: Building a Web Application with MiServer: Part I
 * Dyalog '15 SP02: Building a Web Application with MiServer: Part II
 * Dyalog '15 TP03: Creating and Managing Dyalog-based Services
 * Dyalog '16 SA03: Web Application Development: Part I (with Michael Baas)
 * Dyalog '16 TP03: Web Application Development: Part II (with Michael Baas)
 * Dyalog '17 TP01: A Tale of Two Web-Apps (slides)
 * Dyalog '18 SP01: Cross-Platform User Interfaces Using WC2 (with Michael Baas)
 * Dyalog '18 TP03: MicroServices Made Easy
 * Dyalog '19 SA3: Introduction to HTMLRenderer (with Josh David) (slides)

Competition winner announcements

 * Dyalog '14 U10a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction (with Walt Syzonenko, Fiserv) (slides)
 * Dyalog '15 U09a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction and Prize Ceremony (slides)
 * Dyalog '16 U01: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition
 * Dyalog '17 U13a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Contest – Introduction and Prize Ceremony (with Carlo Spinicci, SimCorp Italiana) (slides)
 * Dyalog '18 U14a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction and Prize Ceremony
 * Dyalog '19 D15: video The APL Problem Solving Competition – How, What and Who (slides)
 * Dyalog '20 U01a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction (slides)
 * Dyalog '21 U01a: How I Won the APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction (slides)
 * Dyalog '21 U04a: The 2021 APL Problem Solving Competition – Introduction