What I'm up to lately

Long time no update.

For the last few months I've become rather silent not only on the planet.lisp blogosphere but pretty much on the whole Common Lisp open source world. The reason for that is that since the beginning of the year I've become proud part of a hot telecom startup. Right after having had a big rush to finish my bachelor thesis in one go.

I've spent the last three months hacking in Malaysia, mostly in Kuala Lumpur, though sugared with occasional visits to tropical islands to keep sanity above a reasonable threshold. I now just arrived on the West coast of Sweden (reasonably close by to Gothenborg) where we're going to spend the next month at as we're told August to be lovely around there.

You bet what we're hacking in. Yes, that's right, we're doing funky TCP/IP related optimization and analysis in that dead, slow language. And I can tell you it's marvellous! It's a whole different experience if you can just make use of the language without being constrained like you usually are when developing open source libraries. We don't have to try to keep the number of dependencies small. We don't have to care about package name collisions. For example, we have a package named FMT containing functions to be used in format strings via ~/FMT:FOO/. Common Lisp is definitively a very nice language for actual product development. And it shows that is has been used for that while it was designed.

Of course, there's more that makes my time so incredibly marvellous: having pleasure to work with bright and, I think, famous guys, like that pseudo-german hacker poster boy Luke Gorrie, the omniscient Stelian Ionescu, homeless dude Ties Stuij of stix.to fame, the Erlang celebrity Sean Hinde, business genius Jane Walerud, and That Clever Statistics Guy. Also seeing different parts of the world, meeting kind people of different cultures, and developing sellable products and thus having customers to care about.

Fun.

Lots of it!