About Me
I usually get referred as being a ‘technical architect’ or a ’software architect’. Since software systems are nowhere close to been at the level of maturity of mechanical engineering or ‘real’ architecture, I would hardly classify myself as an ‘architect’. Since I actually like drawing and painting, and I guess I am somehow decent at it by the way, so perhaps I am an architect, at least of some kind.
Some other people call me a technical troubleshooter. I like this description much better. I am currently working as Yahoo!’s Chief Architect for International. And man, I love it.
I am a technology focused serial entrepreneur. Meaning? I can only focus on challenges while they are not solved. But once solved, I got to move on. (My wife calls this “lack of focus”). The problem is that I have ideas all the time, sometimes crazy and sometimes less crazy.
In a way, I have been writing software for the last 25-ish years, and I have been doing it for living for the last 13 years. When I don’t get to code as much as I would like to at work, I hack on open source.
It actually all started with a good old Sinclair Spectrum48 my dad bought me when I was in my early teens. It had a built-in BASIC interpreter and 48k of memory. The key thing to do with a Sinclair was to play. You would power up, see a black screen, then white, get a prompt “>” where you would type “load”. Start a tape, go and get a glass of Coke, stretch your legs, drink a Coke, watch an episode of Transformers, and suddenly the game would be up an running - no wait, it would reboot and back to the black, then white screen. Hmm, not too much fun. So games, really, were not overly cool (funny thing is I have never ever since played any games on a computer - I get so bored!). Anyway, tired of playing the load-the-tape-game-to-reboot, I started exploring the machine instructions in the zx81 processor, playing with PEEKing and POKEing. Wow, what a difference it made. Fun! The little Sinclair had suddenly become a good tool for expressing my creativity, my ideas. And from there on, I was hooked into computer sciene. Heck, thanks dad!
The opinions expressed here are my own personal perspectives and do not necessarily reflect or represent my employer’s view.