Jonah H. Harris.

Profile of Jonah H. Harris

Jonah is a long-time developer and DBA. He specializes in data structures, algorithms, database internals, and software optimization.

It is rumored that, in his early school years, somewhere between second and third grade, Jonah was introduced to the Commodore VIC-20. His grandmother had one, which he and his sister would often play games on. One day, by accident, he hit a couple keys together, which caused the game to stop and print out some odd-looking text. At first, he thought he had broken the thing–it certainly wouldn’t be the first time–so he turned it off. A couple days later, it happened again. This time he went to the closet, thumbed through the Commodore books, and came upon a two-part Introduction to BASIC; He had hit the jackpot.

After playing around with some of the examples for a while, Jonah wondered whether he could break out of the game again and, this time, change it. Sure enough, he was able to change all kinds of things about the game. In time, he had more fun changing the game than playing it. It was at that moment when he knew there was power in programming.

Several years later, fostered by his grandfather’s hand-me-down computer programming books, Jonah became proficient in not only BASIC, but in Assembly and C as well. While he’s now a polyglot with professional experience in over ten programming languages, his favorite remains to be C.

Jonah blogs on various topics and has presented at many industry conferences. He is passionate about data and his favorite systems to work on are database kernels. To that end, he has committed code to a number of databases and, as a member of The OakTable Network, he researches Oracle Database internals for fun.

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