Seth Falcon joins Hypertext Solutions

Some folks have been asking what type of individuals we are looking for here at Hypertext Solutions. In general, we are looking for star contributors in multiple areas including but not limited to the areas of: text analysis, natural language processing, distributed programming, information retrieval, and data mining. I thought it might be helpful to chat with one of our new hires and ask him why he joined us.

Seth Falcon began working for Hypertext Solutions last week. In addition to being a key individual contributor to the well known open source Bioconductor project, Seth helped lead the overall development efforts for the project and was responsible for orchestrating the efforts of over a hundred contributors scattered world wide. Seth is a known contributor to R, a widely used statistical programming language. Seth brings with him a wealth of statistical and programming knowledge which will help us as we develop beyond our core areas of unstructured and structured text handling.

I asked Seth a couple questions when he first started last week; I have shared these below:

Seth, you obviously were working on very intriguing and influential work. You could have gone anywhere, both to large companies as well as myriad startups. What was it about Hypertext Solutions that really stood out for you as the place to join?

There were a number of factors that made Hypertext Solutions the most intriguing choice for me.  First of all, a small start-up was appealing because I want the excitement of building The Next Big Thing  along with the responsibility of helping to evolve the development culture.  Another factor is the problem domain.  The search space is a rapidly growing domain rife with interesting problems.  So not only did Hypertext provide the start-up environment I was looking for, but it gave me an opportunity to work with cutting edge technologies in a domain that I find interesting and challenging.

So, how do you like it so far?

A few days before I started, I received a "book bomb" from the company (don't worry, just a bunch of books, absolutely no explosives) consisting of a number of technical and fiction titles.  I thought this was a great way to start communicating the company's vision to new hires.    Today is day three.  I continue to be impressed by the technologies that we are working on and am enjoying getting to know my colleagues. I'm really excited about ramping up and starting to contribute to our products.

More about Seth can be found on his blog at: User Primary.