I'm currently working as a software engineer for Nestoria, and loving it.
I'm a Perl hacker, so of course I have some CPAN modules.
I switched from Windows to Ubuntu Linux and I haven't looked back.
A lot of my code, including this website, is up on Github.
I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering with my friends.
You can find me on this Twitter thing everyone's talking about.
I currently live in North East London with my wonderful wife Dotti.
I work at Lokku with a bunch of really great people.
While at university I made some amazing friends.
Perl Projects
WebService::Nestoria::Search
A CPAN module for accessing the Nestoria public API.
You can find it on CPAN here: http://search.cpan.org/dist/WebService-Nestoria-Search/.
Number::Format::SouthAsian
A module for formatting numbers in the South Asian style.
This was released to CPAN as part of my work on Nestoria India. In India the number one hundred thousand is written as "1,00,000" or "1 lakh."
You can find it on CPAN here: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Number-Format-SouthAsian/.
App::highlight
A grep-like filter for highlighting words, which makes use of Perl's powerful regular expression engine.
This is one of many scripts I've written which makes use of Term::ANSIColor to make a simple but very useful script. It's maybe not as powerful or useful as App::Ack but it's still handy to have.
You can find it on CPAN here: http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-highlight/.
Me & Perl
Beginnings
I first learned Perl in 2002 from the O'Reilly book Learning Perl, which from my point of view is the best introduction to programming ever written. Perl's natural language roots are intuitive to me and through the idea of context-based operators and lexical scoping I learned about variables, loops, subroutines, object orientation and all the other concepts that a modern day programmer can't live without.
I see myself as one of what I'm sure are many examples of this graph:
Nestoria
In 2006, between my 2nd and 3rd years of university, I did an internship for a start-up called Nestoria. At the time I joined their property search engine only showed properties for London, and I had to go back to uni just after we launched the whole of the UK. Nestoria was an excellent opportunity for me, not least because it helped me to push my Perl to the next level. The next few levels actually!
Believe it or not before I joined Nestoria I had never heard of the CPAN. Not only that I didn't know what a module was, so even core modules were unknown to me. By the end of my first week at Nestoria I was in love with Data::Dumper, LWP::UserAgent, and Test::More, and by the end of my first month I'd written my own modules.
After my 3rd year of university I headed back to Nestoria and I've now been a full time software engineer for nearly 3 years. During that time I've become an extremely proficient Perl programmer, well versed in unit testing, mod_perl, Moose, DBI, and debugging horrible utf8 problems!
My Linux Story
2002 - Slackware
Its been said of starting out with Linux, if you want to learn Redhat choose Redhat, if you want to learn Debian choose Debian, if you want to learn Linux choose Slackware.
In 2002 Slackware had no package management system and no bootable install CD, you had to compile everything from source and boot from a rootdisk (yes, a 3.5" floppy!) before getting your CD-ROM drive to register. Slackware Linux taught me Linux - it taught me the joys of compiling my own kernel, of make && make test && sudo make install, and of remembering to run /sbin/ldconfig. It also taught me the horrific pain of wrestling with network configuration by hand, and of writing my own XF86Config. Linux on the deskop has come a long way since then.
It was all worth it though. I had a beautifully customized Fluxbox window manager and I was addicted to lbreakout.
2004 - Gentoo / Mandrake
At some point in 2004, a few months before I headed up to London for university if I remember correctly, I switched from Slackware to Gentoo. The lack of package management in Slackware finally got to me!
Gentoo was wonderful, most things just worked, and the things which didn't I got working using Google and my own knowledge. I bought a laptop and set Gentoo up on that too, writing shell scripts to get the brightness controls working, and after a lot of Googling I even got suspend working right.
Parallel to all this Gentoo love, I was also working on the university computers for various projects. They ran Mandrake (now Mandriva) with C Shell, Gnome, and all sorts of new toys. Naturally university taught me a lot - Haskell, Prolog, Java, C, and a ton of theoretical computer sciency courses.
2007 - Ubuntu
Shortly after I got everything working on my Gentoo laptop, it died. It got replaced with a newer model, and I just didn't have the time to go messing in configuration files all over again to get this one up and running, so I decided to try out Ubuntu Linux. It had some small problems, but by and large everything just worked out of the box. Switching from emerge to apt-get wasn't too tricky, and the Synaptic apt GUI helped a lot.
There's not very much to say about Ubuntu. I'm still using 9.10 "Karmic Koala" on my laptop, and everything's working great - No problems with sound, wireless networking, the microphone and webcam. Even my iPhone and my laptop started getting along after a few hours (ok, days) of tinkering.