Stephan Beal's home page
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A brief biography:
Born in 1972 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Spent my growing-up years in Houston, Texas. Compaq relocated me to Munich, Germany in 1997, and i moved from there to Berlin in June, 2006 to be with my loving woman, and we moved back to Munich in late 2007. i've worked professionally with computers since 1994, and hobby-wise since Christmas of 1983. i typically spend all of my spare time developing software or reading about it, or tinkering with boardgames, wargames, and roleplaying games (old-fashioned, pen-and-paper-and-dice games, not for the computer). In fact, this domain name (Wandering Horse) was originally conceived as a name for the gaming company i wanted to create when i was 14 or so.My favourite programming language is C++, but i also know my way around C, Perl, PHP, Java(tm), ECMAScript, plus a number of quasi-languages like the bash shell, SQL, XML/XSLT and "make" (truth be told, i've written some bad-ass Makefile code in my time ;). i am proficient in a wide array of computer-related skills, can play a bit of guitar, and am a fairly prolific writer when the mood strikes, but i can do basically nothing else of any practical use.
Computing is my life, and the Free Software and Open Source movement makes that possible. i have been using Free Software tools since 1994 (the phrase "open source" didn't exist at the time), and have been posting code online since about 1998. The Open Source projects i lead, take active part in, or have contributed significant amounts of noise to within the past few years include such niche-market wonders as:
- s11n: a flexible, easy-to-use serialization library for C++
- v8-juice: a C++ framework for extending the Google v8 JavaScript engine
- QBoard: a tool for boardgame enthusiasts
- whefs: an embedded filesystem library
- SpiderApe, a C++ framework for extending the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine
- toc: "the other ./configure", a replacement for the GNU "auto, my ass!" Autotools
- Various mini-projects
Professionally: i'm a freelancer, currently work as a Unix system administrator at a large european bank. That said: if you think you've got a job for me, i'd much rather be writing code for you than administering computers for unthankful users :). In particular i am intersted in C or C++ work on *nix platforms, but we could discuss whatever computing-related work you might need done.