Jiri Soukup

Jiri has many hats. He taught math, designed a computer control of a mining company, and was one of pioneers who figured out how to design large silicon chips with a computer - the essential step for the rapid evolution of electronics as we know it today. He is a sea captain, offshore sailor, beekeeper, licenced trapper, has 6 children, 16 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. Quoting Robert Heinlein, he believes that "human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfrot the dying, take orders, give orders, buthcher a hog, design a building, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Jiri writes, because he has a lot to say. His novel "On Moving Mountains" (Amazon 2016, Eric Hoffer Award) is about two programmers who are in love and for whom the life is beautiful even when the entire world is collapsing around them. He presents his collection of long stories "Fourteen Tiles" (Amazon 2020) as a proof that real life is often more interesting than any fiction. It is about many unusual, fascinating people who accomplished amazing things.

Jiri also published over 50 technical articles and conference proceedings, and two books about how to design better software,

"Taming C++, Pattern Classes and Persistence for Large Projects" (Addison-Wesley 1994) and, together with Petr Macháček, "Serialization and Persistent Objects, Turning Data Structures into Efficient Databases" (Springer 2014).

Jiri was born and educated in Prague, and lives in Canada since 1970 with the exception of several years in the USA. He was a manager in the Bell Laboratories, M.H. and one of the seven founders of Cadence Design Systems, a major hightech company in California.