John Graham-Cumming

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John Graham-Cumming
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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. 21 July 2012. 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.
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