About Me

I love challenges, particularly solving problems in technology and optimising to make software work faster. I'm self motivated and enjoy working towards a target on my own or in a group.

My IT skills are entirely self-taught, stemming from experimentation and interest in computers and programming at an early age.

I am an open source advocate, but a pragmatist. I realise that proprietary software has its own place in the world. As such, I've made my commitments to both spheres.

I like to put my efforts to helping closed projects realise the benefits of being open and to help them become the best OSS citizens they can.

Contact me:

viroteck@viroteck.net

Current Position

Software Engineer, Collabora Ltd, UK

(March 2010 - Present)

Passionate mobile software engineer, specialising in Qt development.

Strongly interested in creating the best quality software with excellent teams of people.

Highly talented at picking up new skills and talents at rapid pace.

Great familiarity of the wider open source community and related best practices.

Skills

I have a very broad base of knowledge, and am quick to learn new things.

Extensive understanding and interest in BSD sockets and networked programming
Linux (since 2001)
C/C++ (since 2001)
I have worked with both POSIX and Windows platforms and can write cross-platform code.
PHP (since 2002)
MySQL (since 2002)
SVN/Subversion (since 2002)
Qt Development Framework (since 2008)
Git (since 2008)
Python (since 2009)
Ruby and Ruby on Rails (since 2009)

Career Experience

Lead Developer - Omerta Game Ltd, UK

(January 2006 - March 2010)

Development on a large online website written in PHP with a MySQL database backend, in conjunction with a team of other developers consisting of both fulltime staff and volunteers.

Also involved some coordination between management, crew, developers, system administrators, players.

Additional responsibilities:

Developing and instituting best practices for testing, coding and development, including a coding standard, some automated testing, and use of version control.
Planning technical development and rollout of new features.

System Administrator / Software Developer - Rad-Tel, Australia

(December 2005 - June 2006)

Development of corporate website content management system in PHP, with a MySQL database backend.

Development of software used for monitoring and interacting with a radio telemetry system.

Open Source and Hobbyist Commitments

Qt

(2010 - Present)

Qt gained my interest in 2008 as a good platform for fast, efficient development of high performance, high quality software.

I have since started contributing time to write patches and offer code review to Qt, as well as working on helping Qt become a more open project through such initiatives as creating my own community build/constant integration system.

MeeGo

(2009 - Present)

I have contributed to the MeeGo project by offering my knowiedge of Qt, git, and other subjects to the MeeGo developers and community at large through chat, mailing lists, and forums, as well as creating my own projects such as Facebrick, a Facebook client for MeeGo.

Lead Developer, InspIRCd

(2003 - January 2010)

InspIRCd is an extensible, high performance (over 80,000 connections in a single threaded daemon), chat service, written in C++.

My involvement was with public relations management, coding, development, triaging bugs - whilst working with a team including many other developers and nontechnical people.

InspIRCd is the second most popular server software of its type in use today, deployed on hundreds of servers.

I left the project (in good hands) in 2010 in order to seek out new challenges.

Other Projects - http://git.viroteck.net

I have contributed patches to many pieces of software over the years, for more information on some of them, please see my Ohloh profile and my Gitorious profile.

Awards

Information Technology

Distinction in Software Development - 2003
Distinction in Information Processing and Technology (project management, general IT skills) - 2003