David West has enjoyed a dual, parallel, career as a professional software developer and academic. His professional career started in 1968 (same year the discipline of Software Engineering was invented) as a COBOL and Assembler programmer. He has held almost every job title in the profession since then: Analyst, Architect, and even CIO.
As an academic he has created several innovative programs; introducing object-oriented development to the world’s largest software engineering program to an award winning software apprenticeship program.
His undergraduate education was in Asian Philosophy — his graduate education included an MS in Computer Science, MA in Cultural Anthropology, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science.
He is the author of Object Thinking (2006) and co-author with Rebecca Rikner of Design Thinking (2018). He has also published more than fifty papers on topics ranging from object-orientation to Agile, Patterns, Design, and Complexity.