Simon Strandgaard

Born in 1979. Located in Denmark. Fascinated of coding. Has a macmini. Wears glasses. Not rich. Not a genius. Terrible humour. Perfectionist to some degree. Dislikes smelly cheese. Is not religious. Righthanded. Drinks coffee and tea. Addicted to scifi (megacorps, aliens, AI). Keeps wonder why we exists. Loves skiing and vacations in the nature. Paris and Rome are fantastic cities. Uses bike instead of car. Summer is too hot, but winter is too cold. Living in a very small appartment.

Why Does Coding Fascinate?

In a very young age I was exposed to scifi. Coding was a new technology that no one really knew anything about. It seemed to be the next thing to do after lego bricks. The power of creating whatever you want, only limited by your skills and mental capabilities. Soon I met others with the same interest. Today there is still the same fascination, and there is even more friends to shares it with.

Successful Projects

• I wrote AEditor to fit my own needs for a lightweight programming editor. I used it for ~6 month period, before I converted to Mac and temporarily settled with Textmate.
• Try my interactive Color Picker. Its a new approach to picking colors and it has a nice C64 theme.
• I wrote an article on how to Embed Ruby into C++.
• I won the IORCC-2005 obfuscation contest, probably because my code is both valid Ruby and C++ code. See my entry being deobfuscated at Florian Gross' homepage along with the other entries.
• My Regexp Engine is 95% compatible with perl5 and written in Ruby. Its heavily unittested with ~300 testcases and is being exercised with ~1000 patterns.
• My Prime number experiments. I never found a way of visualizing primenumbers, but I made some nice patterns. Somehow I came up with my own A112088 integer sequence.
• Subversion handy backup is my automatic cronjob for doing daily backup of my repositories.
• VBM Training Partner was my workplace. My assignments varied between writing ruby/c++/js/aspnet/c#/sql, css styling, administrating openbsd and mssql.
• opcoders.com is my current workplace (and my own company). I do C++ and cocoa programming. I don't earn any money yet.
• Toolbox is a graphics program for Mac that I am working on. It's a werkkzeug clone without focus on the demo scene (though I would really like to do 64k intros).

I have done other okay projects. None of my projects has ever gotten any momentum, so next time I will target for a wider audience. I hope to make a living doing only open source. Tell me your ideas and donate your money to me, or help support free software.

Unsuccessful Projects

In the past I had little success with things. It took some time for me to become successfull. Years of mistakes has resulted in a number of mistakes, to name a few: CryOS, Ruby Operating System, XEET - the Bombrun game, 3d engine, platform game editor, sound generators, drivers for ancient graphicscards. At several occations I have lost all my code.

I was writing a book about Ruby (in danish), but I lost the repository with its source. However you can see the output here. Maybe I should collect all these pieces and brush it up, so it can become a real book?

It can be educational to do mistakes. Now I hopefully have learned about doing regulary backups.

What Matters?

Version control, backup important data, don't live with broken windows, crash early, review code, use tracer bullets, keep it simple, think!

Code will always be read many more times than written, so the little extra effort that is required to document your code when writing it will pay you back handsomely in the end.

You will never finish a project if you cannot measure real progress. An open-ended goal like 'Performance Improvements' can last forever. By creating goals with a binary state, you make it possible to tell when its done.

Recommendations

Currently I have 67 books about computers, 39 books about mathematics and a few other books. Below is the books which stands out from the crowd. The top most books is most important.

• Don't Make Me Think
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Debugging
• Peopleware
• Design Patterns
• Programming Ruby, version 2, you can read version1 [online].
• Modern C++ Design
• Write Portable Code
• Best Software Writing I
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
• Contextual Design
• UML Distilled
• Computer Organization and Design

• TextMate - the editor (until I write version 2 of AEditor).
• Total Commander - nextgen norton commander.
• Rake (Ruby Make) - a replacement for makefiles.
• GNU Stow - simple package management on unix.

• Deception Point - Fake Meteor, Delta Force, NASA, Politics.
• DaVinci Code - Mona Lisa, Paris and an albino.
• Angels & Demons - CERN, antimatter and a dead pope!

Personal Bookmarks

• My Del.icio.us profile links to interesting on the internet.
• My 43things profile about things I would like to do in my life.
• My Facebook profile keep in touch with friends.
• My Myspace profile. I know this sucks.

• ruby-doc.org/code - reference of ruby's core classes.
• PLEAC - a rosetta stone for programming languages.
• Rake Documentation

• SGI's STL pages - reference of the classes in STL.
• Dinkum's STL pages - reference of the headers in STL.
• cplusplus.com's iostream pages - reference to the iostream lib.
• unix.org - reference to the POSIX api.
• Algorithms in C++

• Anti Patterns - watch out for pitfalls.

• Paul Bourke - code with nice output.

• Apples Cocoa Reference - describes the core classes in Cocoa.
• GNUStep Documentation - close related with Cocoa and best of all its open source!

• FreeBSD Handbook - covers the day to day use of FreeBSD.
• OpenBSD Faq - covers the day to day use of OpenBSD.
• Ubuntu Server Guide - covers the day to day use of Ubuntu Linux.

• Cut-the-knot - 700+ interactive math examples (explore julia fractals).

• Google - search for text, images and video!
• CodeSearch - search for source code.
• Koders - search for source code.
• Babel Fish - translate text/webpages.
• Paste(); - post your messages.
• TheImageHosting - post your images.

• Slashdot - computers.
• The Inquirer - computers.
• IOTD gamedev - Image of the Day.
• IOTD devmaster - Image of the Day.
• The Daily What The Fuck - software crap.
• Engrish! - fun abuse of english.
• Newz.dk - computers in danish.