Luke Evans

I've spent more than thirty years building software for making sense of data — reporting tools, analytics platforms, and the languages that drive them. One thread runs through all of it: multidimensional data, and how to model, compute and explore it without fighting your tools.

I started in embedded systems and UNIX, but found my home in business intelligence. I was a lead developer on Holos, an early multidimensional analysis product built around its own distributed 4GL; Chief Architect at Crystal Decisions, working on Crystal Reports and OLAP tooling; and Chief Scientist at Business Objects, where I ran a research group and co-created CAL, an open-sourced lazy functional language for the JVM. That stretch left me with a handful of patents and a lasting fondness for languages that make hard things expressible.

From there it became as much about people and companies as code. I co-founded Indicee, an early cloud-only BI platform on AWS — used by the likes of Procter & Gamble, BSkyB and Salesforce — and saw it through its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet. I led engineering and research at D&B, then was CTO of Stytch and VP of R&D at Calabrio, bringing enterprise analytics to the cloud and to contact-centre operations.

Today I work independently through Eversosoft as a technical advisor and fractional CTO, helping Vancouver start-ups with product, technology and how to actually ship. And I'm building the thing I've wanted for years: psimulang and Polytope — a reactive modelling language and dimensional engine that distil everything I've learned about multidimensional computation into something modern, elegant and fast.

More than anything, I care about software that's correct by construction and quietly pleasant to use — small surfaces over deep machinery, and tools that feel considered.