Archive for the ‘Other’ Category

Moved to hosted Wordpress

Saturday, February 3rd, 2007

I hate information locking and since I am paying for virtual private hosting I thought I would move out of blogger. I also changed the layout significantly, and used a theme by Neil Merton.

First Entry

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Not the first blog, and likely not the last one. Too many tasks, and short of time. Priorities change. And here I am on a new blog, tired of running my own. I don’t like the chores blogging, and I hate the whole ‘hoo, haa, I got trizillion hits’.

Anyway, to the point, the objective of this blog is to prepare short articles for my forthcoming book on performance analysis for web applications.

And who am I you may wonder? I usually get referred as being a ‘technical architect’, some call me a ‘performance architect’. On my title now it says ‘enterprise architect – operational engineering’. Ney. Software and systems are nowhere close to been at the level of maturity of engineering, including the ‘real’ architecture, so I would hardly classify myself as an ‘architect’ anyway. I like drawing and painting though, and I am pretty decent, I think.

Some people call me a technical troubleshooter. I like this description much better.

A highly technology focused critical entrepreneur, I have been building software and systems for the last 22 years, only the last 8 doing it full time. It 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 it was to play. And games, well, were not that good to be honest. So I quickly got tired of playing, it was not creative, it was not very stimulating.

So I started doing PEEK and POKE. Wow, what a difference it made. Now the little computer had become creative. And I got hooked to it. I evolved to an x286, where I learnt FORTRAN, PASCAL, C and C++. I wrote graphic libraries, windowing toolkits, learnt OOP, all in the late 80s and beginning of the 90s. It was wonderful. There was always so much one could learn. So much I could learn. At the time I was at School in Madrid, Spain, studying ‘Caminos’, a hybrid between civil engineering, applied mathematics and solid mechanics. School was tough, mentally exhausting for 6 years, and I found on programming, along with playing music, a great way to relax with my creative side of the brain. And then one day, like everybody else, I got my degree. Faced with the duty of earning my bread, I started working …

I have done a bit of everything over the course of the last years, ranging from low level kernel programming to business development. On the side I have always maintained contact with the open source community, and I maintain (somehow) caffeine, a hosted Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for the .NET runtime.

Nowadays I live in Kent, UK with my wife Reeta and daughter Anaïs.