John Graham-Cumming

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John Graham-Cumming
Image of John Graham-Cumming.jpg
John Graham-Cumming in 2010
Alma mater University of Oxford (DPhil)
Known for POPFile
The Geek Atlas [1]
Scientific career
Institutions Cloudflare (Board of Directors) [2]
Cloudflare (Former CTO) [3]
Electric Cloud [4]
Thesis The formal development of secure systems  (1992)
Doctoral advisor Jeff W. Sanders
Website www.jgc.org

John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer [5] best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing. [6] UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the apology in September 2009. [7] As of 2025, Graham-Cumming is a member of the Board of Directors at Cloudflare, [8] [9] where he previously served as the company's Chief Technology Officer until March 2025. [10] [11] [12] Prior to joining Cloudflare, he co-founded Electric Cloud. [4]

Contents

Education

Graham-Cumming was educated at the University of Oxford obtaining a BA in Mathematics and Computation and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science in 1992 for research on formal methods for secure computing systems supervised by Jeff W. Sanders. [13] He was an undergraduate and graduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. [13]

Career

Graham-Cumming is the original writer of POPFile, an open-source, cross-platform, machine learning email spam filtering program. [14] He is the author of The Geek Atlas, a travel book, [1] and The GNU Make book, a how-to technical manual for the GNU make software. [15] He also wrote and maintained a library of functions for GNU Make called the GNU Make Standard Library. [16]

In October 2010, he started an organization whose aim is to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, [17] [18] [19] [20] known as Plan 28. [21] He has also campaigned for open-source software in science. [22] In 2014, he launched the MovieCode site on Tumblr, which aims to connect film screenshots to specific extracts of source code. [23] Some of the films and source code covered on the MovieCode website are explored in depth in the form of videos on his site Behind The Screens.

References

  1. 1 2 John Graham-Cumming (2009). The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN   978-0-596-52320-6. OCLC   850983602.
  2. Graham-Cumming, John (2025). "Three Chapters at Cloudflare: Programmer to CTO to Board of Directors". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare. Retrieved 27 March 2025.
  3. Swan, Chris (2014). "John Graham-Cumming on Polyglot Programming and Geek History". infoq.com. C4Media Inc. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  4. 1 2 Melski, Eric (2009). "Seven lessons from seven years at Electric Cloud". electric-cloud.com. Archived from the original on 25 February 2020.
  5. Anon (2010). "John Graham-Cumming Profile". The Guardian . London. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  6. Whiteman, Hilary (2009). "Petition seeks apology for Enigma code-breaker Turing". CNN. CNN . Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  7. "PM's apology to codebreaker Alan Turing: we were inhumane", The Guardian, 11 September 2009
  8. Graham-Cumming, John (2025). "Three Chapters at Cloudflare: Programmer to CTO to Board of Directors". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare. Retrieved 27 March 2025.
  9. "Cloudflare Appoints Three New Board Members". cloudflare.net. Cloudflare. 2025. Retrieved 27 March 2025.
  10. Graham-Cumming, John (2019). "Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 1: How I came to work here". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare.
  11. Scammell, Robert (2020). "CTO Talk: Q&A with Cloudflare's John Graham-Cumming". verdict.co.uk.
  12. Graham-Cumming, John (2019). "Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 2: The Most Difficult Two Weeks". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare.
  13. 1 2 Graham-Cumming, John (1992). The formal development of secure systems. ox.ac.uk (DPhi thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC   60063995. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.315747.
  14. Schechter, Bruce (8 March 2003). "Spambusters". newscientist.com. New Scientist . Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  15. Graham-Cumming, John (2008). The GNU Make Book. No Starch Press. ISBN   9781593276492. OCLC   896860365.
  16. "GNU Make Standard Library". gmsl.jgc.org. Retrieved 10 June 2023.
  17. Fildes, Jonathan (2010). "Campaign builds to construct Babbage Analytical Engine". bbc.co.uk. BBC News . Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  18. Graham, Duncan (3 March 2011). "A £400,000 PC downgrade: Rebooting Babbage's Analytical Engine". wired.com. Wired . Retrieved 23 August 2024.
  19. "The Greatest Machine That Never Was: John Graham-Cumming at TEDxImperialCollege". youtube.com. YouTube. 26 April 2012. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  20. "John Graham-Cumming: The greatest machine that never was". ted.com. TED . Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  21. "Plan 28: Building Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine". plan28.org. Retrieved 24 July 2012.
  22. Ince, Darrel C.; Hatton, Leslie; Graham-Cumming, John (2012). "The case for open computer programs". Nature . 482 (7386): 485–488. Bibcode:2012Natur.482..485I. doi: 10.1038/nature10836 . PMID   22358837.
  23. Johnson, Phil (2014). "The sources of all that code you see in TV and movies". itworld.com. ITworld. Archived from the original on 11 January 2014. Retrieved 13 January 2014.