I am Bernd Jendrissek, a freelance software developer. I find almost everything interesting - whether software or not. Current occupations include welding, woodworking, amateur telescope making, various Free Software projects, electronic design. The worst insult I can think of would be to accuse someone of being incurious.
As a lifelong autodidact, I've been writing computer programs since I was a child, although perhaps the first few years shouldn't count. My first "real" programming experience started in about 1989, when as an ever so slightly older child I started learning C. A few years after I was writing useful programs (mostly only to me; certainly available only to me). One day I hope to recover one or more of these early items. After school and university I became economically active as a software developer [PDF, ~60kB].
I'm trying to make my second million - which is supposed to be easier than the first. There are a few ideas I'm trying out; some of them grandiose, and some more banal. Part of the adventure is trying many things, and seeing what works. Fail cheap, they say.
If there's something I can do for you, that relates somehow to my skills and interests, send me a message. I don't sign pompous NDAs.Nasier generously hosts this site. Thanks!
I offer these services:
- Plain old development. You can never finish your project too fast.
- Low-intensity sysadmin work on a retainer basis. The smart way to have a lawyer, the smart way to have a Unix wizard
- Code reviews. You know as well as I do that nobody does these unless at gunpoint.
- Revision history analysis. I'll tell you which of your team members are stars (not all of them).
- Poor-cousin legacy software maintenance. Because you have more important things for your own staff to do.
- Reverse-engineering crappy code. I've never won the IOCCC though so you may reasonably question my fluency in crap.
- PCB layout. I'm a newbie, and I find it strangely relaxing. Try my online gerber viewer
Services that I will need:
- A lawyer. Someone who can help me avoid NDAs, and who can craft contracts that let me take over the world.
- An accountant. Maybe later, when I have actual income.
- Social butterflies. I suck at selling stuff, you don't.
- A wife. I hate cooking. But I have a plan for figuring out what to cook.
Links
- My CV
- mkpatch - I use this with
:set patchmode=.borigin .vimrc to get diffs of whatever I changed. - My code blog.
- My un-code blog - more personal / political / crackpot stuff.
- Breadcrumb trails for web indexes to help find random people.
- My gEDA fork. I felt like I was wasting my time trying to get my patches accepted, so I bit the fork and decided to maintain my own development line to address my needs/wants.
- I have added a useful level of OMF support to binutils. Missing: object writing.
- Some silly bootstrap tools, very much a work in-progress. Just for fun, it indulges one of my dystopian fantasies.
- View the HTTP request headers your browser sends. Lists info about uploaded files too.
- OpenBVE route for Cape Town to Simon's Town - very rough draft, made by eyeballing Google Maps + Openstreetmaps.
- Magic carpet pseudo-train for ride-testing BVE routes.
- BVE track generator - creates canted rail objects with smooth transitions.
- BVE route printer - convert a BVE route (CSV format) into a PDF with background.
- Email validation hall of shame.
- spectrum-diff - a Perl tool to take the difference between two spectrum exports from Audacity.
- An example of potentially infringed copyrighted material, serving as an example to illustrate a comment at internetcases.com.
- My attempt at a latching analog switch for someone in ##electronics.
- A citizen science project born at the Africa@home hackfest during November 2011, where I wrote up a simple SETILive-like page for volunteers to find solar flares.
- My list of open problems for researchers and hackers of all media.
- My shit-list - people, companies, and other things that annoy me.
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Random code doodles:
- Generate Pythagorean triples in Scheme.
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My night photos of the Eihatsu Maru:
- From Victoria Road
- A wide-angle shot from the beach
- and another narrow-angle photo.
- Photos of the night sky:
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Hikes:
- An edge on Devil's Peak
- Panoramas from yet another failed attempt to reach Minor Peak
Feral grapevine
I didn't deliberately plant this grapevine; it germinated while lying on top of some compacted soil with some other seeds (of various species). One day I noticed it had germinated, and that the leaves looked like those of a grapevine. Even a small plant like this one has beautiful autumn colours!
