Wallace (Wally) Trenholm
I was fortunate enough to start my University education and career during the boom of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In my second year of university I worked a part time job at the computer Help Desk, assisting staff and mainly students with computer lab services and getting set-up on the Internet. That’s where I met Wallace (Wally) Trenholm.
While most of us were working with Windows machines at the Help Desk there was a co-worker that would type away on a very strange looking computer in the corner. I later came to learn it was a Solaris SPARCstation and Wally was toiling away in Unix shells and X-Windows the common Unix GUI interface.
Wally quickly impressed upon me a deep knowledge of computers and Unix, all at a very rapid pace. He was a wealth of knowledge. As you talked to him his mind would fly through concepts and start branching off into related concepts, quickly coming back to the main thought and branching off again. We were both in the Computer Science program but I could tell he was exploring all the concepts and technology available to us at a much deeper level. While most of us dabbled in Windows, Web Browsers and networked multiplayer games, Wally made the most of his exposure to computer systems not normally available at home to learn as much as he could about Unix based operating systems as they were at the heart of the global network that was now taking over the planet. I remember one of his earliest stories was typing the innocuous `su` command which by default attempts to switch you to the root user of the system, only to be very quickly confronted by the overly paranoid chief of network security at the university.
At the end of university we would meet up again as contractors working for Bell Sympatico on their various web properties. Wally would follow that up focusing on his personal consulting business Epoch Integration by working with common friends to build and market client server technologies for Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry devices, eventually being acquired by RIM.
I remember visiting Wally a few times at his downtown condo and smiling at the array of technology he was always hacking away on while a business cable network was playing on the TV. Wally’s interest in high frequency trading seemed to continually occupy his brain while he was somehow able to simultaneously concentrate on software development. Just like at the help desk he would continue to educate me on the latest technology and give me updates on his flying lessons and high aspirations to level up to a helicopter pilot, which of course he eventually achieved. His mind would easily switch between multiple streams of consciousness.
Wally is the epitome of continual learning and exploration. His dedication to master specific topics always impressed me. It has taken me years to master topics by letting too many concepts distract me. Wally is one of the few people I know that selects a subject they are passionate about and focuses on extracting the maximum amount of knowledge. It’s why he’s on My52.
LinkedIn: wallace-wally-trenholm
