Being a responsible Public Domain software user

Why am I blogging?


Being a contract Software Engineer I daily rely on a vast array of Public Domain components. This allows the teams I work in to focus more on the business requirements rather than the low-level stuff and thus we can quickly deliver complex highly functional systems.


The problem is, though, that inevitably we come across something that a library doesn't implement or a bug in the latest version that has not yet been fixed.


I have yet to come across a client that is willing to pay for your time to implement/fix the issue and usually we have to find some other solution or implement some hacky work around.


As such, and as I am "resting" between contracts, I have decided to try and put something back in to the Public Domain community by using my own free time to address some of the issues that arose in my last contract.


I'm hoping to use this blog to document and manage this work.

Introduction

Who am I?


My name is Tony Jewell and I have been coding since 1978 when I joined the London Home Office and Metropolitan Police as a Junior COBOL programmer. I had actually dabbled a bit before then at school using a very modern Teletype machine connected via modem to a mainframe computer in a London Polytechnic.


With a brief interlude at University College London to do a degree in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering I have spent the bulk of my time as a contractor in the Financial markets in London.


My favourite languages are C and Java and for OS its Unix.


My Web sites are:
www.cregganna.com
mov.ie


My Linked in profile is: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonyjewell