Hello World.
I’m Mark, and I do a lot of programming, designing of systems, working ridiculous hours, ranting about many things, and I am frequently guilty of re-inventing wheels (which shall henceforth be refered to as either ‘improvement’ or ‘learning’ :-). Currently, I am involved in re-inventing designing a new suite of telephone conference call back-end systems for a rapidly expanding conference call company, from the ground up.
Doing this kind of work on the carrier grade level involves the convergence of a lot of technologies, and there’s a truckload of R&D involved, which is bloody fantastic since I get bored too easily when there’s nothing new to learn, or not enough diversity.
I arrived in this part of the IT industry after doing some weird things:
- Five years in the games industry (hellishly boring; trust me – I’ll explain why another time)
- A few years developing bespoke systems, providing services and Linux “appliances” for businesses around South Africa
- Loads of freelance development on various platforms (mobile handsets, 8-bit embedded systems, even Windows apps)
- An entire childhood & adolescence involved (misspent?) in the demoscene. Epic fun. Low-level programming, register fiddling, cycle counting and reverse engineering is the shit!
Anyway, talk is cheap, and I’ve clogged the Intertubes quite enough!
Coming up next, something that has been a constant thorn in my side as a wretched Debian user: building custom kernels.
