Paul Yao

Paul is president of The Paul Yao Company, and first and foremost a programmer. He has been writing code since his high school days, where he started working on an HP 2000E mini-computer at school. He learned enough to get a job at a timesharing company in Washington, DC, where he worked on DEC 10 mainframes at the tender age of 13.

In addition to being a business owner, Paul parlays his extensive programming background to be an internationally recognized teacher and a sought after technical writer. It's no surprise that both of Paul's parents were teachers - his father was a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska in genetics before joining the FDA, and his mother is a 20 year veteran of teaching high-school math. He got his love of education from his parents, and graduated in 1983 from Georgetown University with a degree in International Relations. While applied math is the usual course of study for an engineer, not Humanities, Paul finds his Foreign Service training useful when traveling to Bangalore, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland and Cleveland.

His start in the wonderful world of GUI development began when Paul was asked to help teach the first publicly available course on Windows Programming. At about that time, he co-authored, with Dave Durant and Geta Carlson, the first book published on Windows programming, Programmer's Guide to Windows (Sybex, 1987).

Since that time, Paul has been involved full-time with Microsoft Windows and related technologies. He co-authored a total of five books on Windows programming, including Peter Norton's Windows 3.1 Power Programming Techniques, and Programming Windows 95 with Charles Petzold. For over 12 years, Paul has been a contributing editor to Microsoft Systems Journal (now known as MSDN Magazine). He is a regular contributor on topics of interest to Windows CE and Pocket PC developers. See press releases for his upcoming books.

Along with the rest of the company team, Paul is a runner and a triathlete. He ran his first marathon in fall of 1997, and since that time has run four marathons, and countless half-marathons and 5Ks. He finished two sprint-distance triathlons, the most exciting of which was the Oceanside Triathlon in 2000 when he had a close call with the Oceanside pier - and survived to tell the tale.