About Me

Who Am I?

Developer, part time sysadmin and Project Manager, I've been passionate about IT since the Commodore 64 days (yes, I am that old), followed with an Amiga 500 and then the x86 (since around 1990) world.

Having fun with DOS, Windows, OS/2, finally seeing the light around 2000 when moving to a Linux desktop, after having appreciated UNIX in University.

In 2000, the Linux desktop was a bit different from today - kernel recompilation was common to solve issues, and Gnome and KDE were not so friendly, not to speak about basic productivity, but the freedom sensation that I got still stays with me these days. So I can ignore mermaids from the Mac OS X world, although I have been happy to provide a MacBook to my wife and get rid of Windows issues.

Linux(es)

SuSE, Debian, Gentoo and Fedora in the past 7 years. Plus CentOS and RedHat. Ubuntu is mostly ok, but I am not interested. I was looking for alternatives on the desktop since the nineties, Apple machines were too costly, and Apple System 7 was not that good (only easy for the user).

I played a couple of years with OS/2 Warp in a dual boot setup, tried a couple of RedHat releases, then stopped experimenting until I began again working with UNIX-y systems in the dot-com boom of the 1999-2000 era. Working on Solaris, with a shell, remembering long lost concepts from the university days.  SuSE was easier than the rest of the bunch, and KDE looked more polished and promising than the rest of DEs. After a couple of boxed sets (those days you used to pay for this stuff...) switched to Debian for a year, and then Gentoo.

I think anybody serious about learning Linux (in the core development / system administration area) 

should have a look at Gentoo (or Linux From Scratch) to understand and appreciate the complexities of what we regularly use, and the possibilities we have. But most of us have not the time to infinitely tune our workstation so, after a while, move on. I landed in Fedora - land, where I still am.

Development

I have been programming since age 14, on the C64. Those days we had BASIC and assembler (I tried a FORTH interpreter also), with long lines of PEEK and POKE to load assembly programs into RAM. Ah, memories...

Amiga taught me C development (and partially C++) - who can remember Lattice C and Aztec C on this old platform? - then the move to DOS put me with the Borland compilers - Turbo Pascal, Turbo C/C++, I also got a complete boxed set of Borland C Compiler.

I moved on to Delphi, and worked in PowerBuilder version 5 and 6, with a bit of Dbase III and Clipper in the mix. 

On Delphi, thanks to the Interbase engine bundled, I learned about SQL, including database design and normalization, which I also studied in theory. Later on, I worked with Oracle and SQL Server."Working with" means installation, configuration, optimization...
Then came Java - which I felt was a very interesting platform. First for the client (with horrible performance), then some failed technology (try googling for IBM San Francisco...) then came Java Enterprise Edition - Servlet, EJB 1.0, later JMS, JNDI...Java has been my platform for years, working mainly in WebLogic, then JBoss (can't stand WebSphere), but also jetty, Hibernate, Spring, Maven, Tibco, and a lot of buzzwords..
In last years, I began looking around for something new, and I've found a new home in Python, Django and related. Also my experimentation moved somewhat to big data (Hadoop, MongoDB) and parallel processing and high performance computing.

You can find some bits about me in my linkedin profile.