My name is Michael Cooper.
Education-wise, I have undergraduate degrees in Physics and Pure Mathematics from the University of Calgary. I’ve also been programming since I was five years old, so it’s kind of a second language for me.
I’ve always had a fondness for measurement. I worked for 15 years developing software for seismic exploration in oil and gas. This involved creating analysis tools to determine if a proposed design would meet the project’s imaging requirements.
In 2010, I developed an audible GPS for skydivers and BASE jumpers, which acts sort of like an aircraft’s instruments. One of my favourite parts of this job is analyzing data—taking simple position and velocity measurements, and squeezing as much meaning as I can out of them.
A few years ago, a friend introduced me to espresso, and I fell in love with the process. On the surface, it’s a simple extraction, but when you start asking questions there’s a tremendous amount of depth to be explored. Sometimes, it can be difficult to design an experiment which isolates a particular variable. What’s not to love?
I started this blog as a way of formalizing some of these explorations. I’ve often found that it’s easy to overlook details when you build something that only you use, or if you do an experiment but don’t have to explain the results to someone else. At the same time, publishing makes possible collaboration with the community, which can result in so much more growth than working alone.
I hope you’ll comment if you find something especially helpful, or if you find something wrong. Thanks for joining me on this journey.