Peter

About me:

In 2002 I was involved in forming the New Zealand Open Source Society. I was involved with several projects run by the society, primarily around objecting to Microsoft patents in New Zealand. I also presented the societies point of view to the NZ Government when they were considering the new Copyright Ammendment Bill. I have been a professional software developer since 1990, or the grand total of seventeen years. I started programming at age 11 on my ZX81. In 1987 when the IBM Clone PC became popular I was involved in the Bulletin Board System community, developing my own BBS software called Jupiter IO. This system was a english based system. The failure of this approach led myself and Adrian Dorrington to develop "Protocol 4", which was a vector based communication language that allowed us to transmit images and position text rather than having simple scrolling text like the existing consoles. In 1990 I joined the ranks of professional software developers. I did a variety of work from this point on, both contract and full time, with a stint of unemployment as well, followed by a sales job that I sucked at. Getting back into the computer programming field I moved from XBase type languages into Windows based GUI applications using Delphi. I had a few jobs writing Delphi Applications. In 1999 the writing was on the wall however; Java had some serious advantages to Delphi, so I spent my own time becoming proficient in Java. In 2002 I wrote a book on Tomcat, the Java Web Server. This came as a result of writing a guide and publishing it on my own web site that I was running using Caldera Linux. After writing a book on the subject employment in the field became somewhat easier, and I ended up leading projects. About 2002 I also started the NZOSS, which also involved me deeper in the technical community. I ended up working for Asterisk and handling their software development. By 2007 I have reinforced my skills as a manager, and now lead a major software product development with about twenty people in the team. I have also stepped down as president of the NZOSS, and have as of 8 December become married to the former Penny Sunderland.