I've been programming since I was 12 (C64, Tiki 100). Admittedly back then I only did random number generation for my classmates fantasy soccer leagues and text book/computer magazines sprites and simple stuff like that.
Starting in 1995 my father bought his first pc. For some reason or another the pc came with IBM Helpware, available 24/365, priced at somewhere below 85$/year using todays exchange rates. I called them quite a few times, including new years eve and midsummer nights eve.
I used to be very impressed with how they could guide anyone through every computer maintenance procedure over the phone, - including backup, fdisk and restore. (remember, this was before external hard drives, internet, and vnc).
I guess somehow some of that support-foo transferred and since then I've been doing support and training, first for my younger brothers and later for friends and family and since around 1998 I also did paid support until 2008.
A short summary of interesting things I've done:
I grew up on a farm. I took care of my fathers dairy farm when he was away in weekends, I took care of my uncles goat farm for a couple of weeks while he was on holiday with his family. I have been holding the end of a rope with a scared horse in the other end for 50 meter before getting back in control, I can start a chainsaw (it's not hard but if you wonder what I mean, try without instructions) and I read the manuals for my fathers ibm 486 dx2 66 in between leveling out trailer loads of grass.
I have a bachelors degree in computer systems engineering.
As part of our last year we ran a project together with a local company. Based on- a gps receiver,
- a gsm modem and
- access to the companys geodata
Needless to say, google came and ate our lunch, and it feels safe to say that the project would never been huge commercial hit anyway. Based on our knowledge at that point however it was more than anyone could expect. What we ended up doing was using a JavaCC parser to convert the geodata from the Norwegian SOSI format to GML, and then run it through an xslt transform to get SVG. While I wasn't much involved in the transform I wrote most of the javascript to display the maps, zoom in and out, dynamically (think ajax) load positions and messages from the base station into the gps solution. This was my first real foray into javascripting. The rest of the group made the back end solution solution, the web site (oh joyful first introduction to the IE peekaboo bug three hours before deadline) and the software to download gsm and gps data.
To save bandwith the data ended on a local disk and updates were sent in text messages (I can't remember but guess this was before gprs went mainstream). Gps positions and sms messages to load were then placed in the same folder as the map as they arrived. This also helped us work our way around the "same origin" policy. And yes, we ran it in Adobes SVG-plugin in IE 6.
I have spent one year working as a almost unpaid volunteer sys admin for a church, running the IT systems on one of Norways biggest convention centers. Mostly Windows. One of the tasks that fell on me was to call Dell every time an optiplex broke because of badcaps. Dell refused to change a single mainboard until it was actually broken, most of our 30 machines broke down during that year, and the support technician from back then still recognized me when he came to fix a server a few months ago at a completely different company.I have spent a year as teacher, teaching computer maintenance to teenagers. In addition to the usual stuff you tell those kids (listen boys; if you are going to be sys admins you are going to do this a lot of times so you better get it right. Forget that mouse for now. Use only the keyboard as far as possible. Remember the modifier keys, shift to select...), they also had a fair chance to learn
- A little programming teory and practice
- Modx cms and
- Basic use of Ubuntu server including text editing in a shell,
3 months at a small telecommunications company maintaining PHP, creating Java software and supporting users on Linux workstations.
From May 2009 to January 2012 I worked as sysadmin/software engineer for HS News Systems AS, a small company that produces book and magazine commisioning systems and book and magazine returns systems.
My day to day work mostly consisted of adding features and fixing bugs in Java code, in addition to sys admin tasks like hardware monitoring, server hardware and software setup as well as helping their international support team when they got stuck.
I've also had the opportunity to do some installations and service visits for customers in Europe and North America.
Starting from January 2012 I am working with technical safety solutions for a company in the marine safety business. Won't go into details here but think mostly standard marine electronics coupled with some really nice signal processing.
