First Entry

Not my first blog, and likely not the last one. Sadly I lost my posts since 2000. 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.