Howard G. Cunningham was born in Michigan City, Indiana, on May 26, 1949. He grew up in Highland, Indiana, staying there through high school. He received his bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary engineering and his master's degree in computer science from Purdue University, graduating in 1978. He is a co-founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, a software consultancy he started with his wife. He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the TektronixComputer Research Laboratory. He is founder of The Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programming conference which it sponsors. Cunningham was part of the Smalltalk community. From December 2003 until October 2005, Cunningham worked for Microsoft in the "Patterns & Practices" group. From October 2005 to May 2007, he held the position of Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation. In May 2009, he joined AboutUs as its chief technology officer. On March 24, 2011 The Oregonian reported that Cunningham had quietly departed AboutUs to join the Venice Beach-based CitizenGlobal, a startup working on crowd-sourced video content, as their chief technology officer and the Co-Creation Czar. He remains "an adviser" with AboutUs. Cunningham left CitizenGlobal and is now a programmer at New Relic.
Ideas and inventions
Cunningham is well known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. The most famous among these are the wiki and many ideas in the field of software design patterns, made popular by the Gang of Four. He owns the company Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., a consultancy that has specialized in object-oriented programming. He also created the site WikiWikiWeb, the first internet wiki. When asked in a 2006 interview with internetnews.com whether he considered patenting the wiki concept, he explained that he thought the idea "just sounded like something that no one would want to pay money for." Cunningham is interested in tracking the number and location of wiki page edits as a sociological experiment and may even consider the degradation of a wiki page as part of its process to stability. "There are those who give and those who take. You can tell by reading what they write." In 2011, Cunningham created Smallest Federated Wiki, a tool for wiki federation, which applies aspects of software development such as forking to wiki pages. He signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development Cunningham has contributed to the practice of object-oriented programming, in particular the use of pattern languages and the class-responsibility-collaboration cards. He also contributes to the extreme programming software development methodology. Much of this work was done collaboratively on the first wiki site. Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer a question. According to Steven McGeady, Cunningham advised him of this on a whim in the early 1980s, and McGeady dubbed this. Although originally referring to interactions on Usenet, the law has been used to describe how other online communities work, such as Wikipedia. Cunningham himself denies ownership of the law, calling it a "misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet."
