Alan Talbot started programming in 1972, in BASIC on a DEC PDP-8. He began his professional programming career in 1979 and started using C++ in 1989. For 20 years he was a pioneer in music typography software, then spent 8 years writing digital mapping software, and has spent the last 9 years writing railroad simulation software. He has been a member of the C++ Standards Committee since 2005, and most of his Committee work has focused on improvements in efficiency. His contributions include container emplace, extract and merge of associative container nodes, and the emancipation of unions.