Hi All,
Following the introductory email tradition :-)
My name is Marcus Crafter and I'm 27 years old. I come from a small
country town in rural South Australia called Mount Gambier, but are
currently working in Frankfurt, Germany, in a project at the Dresdner
Bank.
My history with computers starts quite a while back. My father
works back home in Australia at a company which supplies office
machinary to various companies around our small town. When I was
about 7 years old he brought home our first computer, a Texas
Instruments TI-99/4A. I was immediately hooked, and would sit
there for hours typing in old TRS-80 games from various magazines we
found at the local library.
After the TI-99/4A, my dad brought home a newer machine, never to
be heard of again, known as the Sharp MZ-700. The MZ-700 was
where I learn't about 'peek's and 'pokes's, and those funny
'data ...' sections at the end of basic programs :-)
About the same time I also played around with the Commodore-64's and
BBC's at school, mainly writing graphical programs and seeing what
hires graphics these machines could do (if any :-) ).
After a while my dad started selling IBM compatibles as they
were termed back then, and an Amstrad 2086 found it's way to our
house running DOS and Windows 86, I think packaged along with
QuickBasic at the time.
Not long after, I discovered the Amiga, and when I turned 18,
bought an Amiga 500 from one of the local dealers. Amazed at
it's graphics and sound capabilities I ended up getting right into the
Amiga Demo scene, getting my hands on as many demos as possible,
like Substance from Quartex, Enigma from Phenomena, Global Trash
from Silents. The list goes on... :-)
Games never really interested me that much apart from a few, it was
always what extreme things people did in demos with their hardware. I
still get a little lump in my throat when I think back and remember
discovering what such demo's could do on my little Amiga. :-)
After high school I went to LaTrobe University in Melbourne. I
studied Computer Systems Engineering there. I graduated in
1997, specializing in software engineering, specificially cross
platform user interfaces. Java was quite new then, and was a
big part of my thesis. For my project I ended up writing a gui
builder using AWT which was a challenge when I found out what
(little) AWT could actually do :-)
During University I reentered the PC world, but thankfully discovered
Linux and was able to abandon the DOS/Windows world. I haven't turned
back since, and now use Debian Linux both at home and at work.
After graduating, I started working for an Australian company
which sent me here to work at Dresdner Bank in Germany. My latest
project at work is where I came across Avalon, through Cocoon.
We use Cocoon to power an internal portfolio management system.
After learning about Avalon while going through the Cocoon source I
started to refactor our home-grown classes in to Avalon components and
hence ended up here on avalon-dev.
Currently I've been working with Leif on the profiler/instrumentor
package, and look forward to making that a killer app. It has so
much potential :-)
It's great to be part of a such a high quality team and I really
look forward to learning a lot more about software engineering
and design.
Thanks again!
Cheers,
Marcus
--
.....
,,$$$$$$$$$, Marcus Crafter
;$' '$$$$: Computer Systems Engineer
$: $$$$: ManageSoft GmbH
$ o_)$$$: 82-84 Mainzer Landstrasse
;$, _/\ &&:' 60327 Frankfurt Germany
' /( &&&
\_&&&&'
&&&&.
&&&&&&&:
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
