Goodbye 2006, Howdy 2007! [Jan. 1st, 2007|01:23 am] Luke Gorrie

A new weblog for a new year!



My excuse is that I'm learning Squeak Smalltalk so I'm going to need a way to post screenshots, something that's beyond the capabilities of my custom weblog, and frankly the thought of using Blogger's Emacs-user-hostile web interface makes me want to scratch my eyes out. So here I am on Livejournal in the good company of my internet-buddies darius and xach.



Once upon a time I did lots of internet-visible hacking and really enjoyed the feeling of participation in the community with all of you bastards. My resolution for 2007 is to pick this up again.



The past couple of years I've instead worked really hard with some friends to build up a happy little Erlang company with an office where we drink our coffee. We've developed and marketed a system for mobile phone companies to keep track of all the mobile phones their customers are using and to automatically send configurations for picture messaging, web browsing, and so on. We've installed these systems in over 60 countries and have more than 200 million of you puny humans represented in our Mnesia databases. We're the market leaders and have only a fraction of our competitors' staff size, but of course you guessed this when I said "Erlang". :-)



I've installed more than a couple of our systems myself and I've done a lot of on-site hacking. This has been a fun experience. A couple of times customers have looked into the Emacs window over my shoulder and said "aha, that's Erlang!" Twice I've been told "oh, you have magic!" while I develop and install new features into a live system while simultaneously holding a conversation with the customer. I must say that I enjoy the adventure-hacker world-travelling customer-impressing lifestyle :-)



Here're the bits of the earth I've dragged my muddy boots through so far:



Bahrain's too small to be on this map but I assure you it's a lovely place with very friendly people!



... and so to distill this post down to its essense: Hello again, world!