olympum

I am software dude, currently working at Yahoo!’s as Tech Yahoo, Architect Fellow, in the Cloud Platform Group. I am a technologist with an entrepreneurial spirit. I like working in environments where technical prowess creates new business opportunities. I enjoy coding and I don’t think it’s possible to remain a technologist without coding.

I started off with a Sinclair ZX81 my dad bought me for Christmas in 1982, right after its release. The Spectrum has a built-in BASIC interpreter and is able to generate a 16-colour palette and some degree of sound modulation. All in a grand 1024 bytes. The Spectrum was quite a novelty, but honestly quite boring otherwise. It would power up, show a black screen, then a copyright on a white background, and finally you would get a prompt “>” where to type “load” and start the tape.

Loading a program would take anything between 3 and 5 minutes, and most frequently the load would fail right at the end of the tape – back to the white screen. Applications on the Spectrum were really not cool. I got tired of playing the load-the-tape-game-to-reboot, so I started exploring the assembler for the ZX81. It became fun. The little Sinclair had suddenly transformed from a boring piece plastic to a creative tool. From there on, I was hooked into software development, moving through BASIC, C, 8088 assembler, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Scala, Clojure and JavaScript. I am extremely grateful to my parents for opening the doors to a hobby that was to become my career.

The opinions expressed here are my own personal perspectives and do not necessarily reflect or represent my employer’s view.

You can follow me on twitter as @olympum.