So that's what Joe was up to

Sometimes it takes me a decade or so to realize what's going on. Reading this blog entry tonight, I finally realized 14 years later what Joe Kaiping and Joe Grohens were up to.

It was 1994; Wolfram Research's Joe Grohens had sent one of his TeX gurus, Joe Kaiping, to the TeX Users Group conference in Santa Barbara, California, while my employer sent me, Rich Rogers and Mike Hockaday. We met Kaiping and he joined our little gang of young geeks. It happened that his problem and my interests overlapped, and I wound up months later porting the Wolfram flavor of LaTeX to some Mac version of TeX. This was the early 1990s, so when I finished the project I FedEx'd the code to him on a pile of floppies. (!)

One day in 1996 he dropped me an email and suggested I apply for his position at Wolfram - he was heading off to a private consulting gig and they needed another guy who knew TeX. My interview with his boss, Joe Grohens, was rather perfunctory and involved no coding at all. And now I realize, after all these years, that they had already conducted the code-writing part of the interview by having me do the porting job months earlier.