Robin Burchell - Projects

I'm Robin Burchell, perhaps better known as w00t / w00teh on IRC and other online

locations. I'm an Australia turned Norwegian, living near Trondheim in the middle of

Norway, where I've lived since 2011 since my wife-to-be dragged me to be closer to her

family.

I love solving real-world problems in technology and making software go faster. I enjoy

writing code, but not to the point where I want to rewrite everything forever. I dream of

a world of seamless technology so I never run out of amusing pictures of cats on the

internet.

I'm registered as a company, as a sole trader in Norway (enkeltmannsforetak) - org nr 997

379 144. I provide consultant software engineering, focusing around Qt

platform/applications development on embedded/desktop/mobile.

If you'd like to contact me, the easiest way is through email: abo5qr@r.postjobfree.com, though

there are some other ways to get hold of me too. I also have a linkedin profile.

Current Position

Owner, Burchell Software

(September 2011 - Present)

Passionate software consultant and open source hacker, specialising on Qt (embedded,

mobile, and desktop), performance analysis and optimisation.

You may be familiar with some of the work I've done, for instance, the contacts

application on the Nokia N9.

For other examples of my work, my youtube channel might be a good place to look.

Skills

I have a very broad base of knowledge, and am quick to learn new things. Here's some

things I'm really good at.

Platforms (I can write cross-platform code!):

Linux (since 2002)

OS X (since 2011)

BlackBerry Playbook / BB10 / QNX (since 2011)

Android (since 2011)

Maemo/MeeGo (since 2009)

Technologies

C/C++ (since 2002)

Qt Development Framework (since 2008)

Ruby and Ruby on Rails (since 2009)

QML (since 2011)

SVN/Subversion (since 2002)

Git (since 2008)

I work with a lot of different technologies. I find it fun to try new things, as a

result, this is a long list of buzzwords I've picked up at random just to try out.

leveldb / SQL / wayland / llvmpipe / opengl / antialiasing algorithms / inter-process

communication / JSON (& QtJsonDb) / sorting algorithms / intrusive data containers /

gesture recognition / scalable image drawing / X11 / threading / POSIX networking /

network protocols

Previous Positions

Software Engineer, Collabora Ltd, UK

(March 2010 - August 2011

)

Software engineer with an emphasis on mobile, working on applications and platform

development, specialising in Qt.

Required talents:

Strongly interested in creating the best quality software with excellent teams of people.

Highly talented at picking up new skills and technologies at rapid pace.

Great familiarity of the wider open source community and related best practices.

You may be familiar with some of the work I've done, for instance, the contacts

application on the Nokia N9.

Lead Developer - Omerta Game Ltd, UK

(January 2006 - March 2010)

Development on a large online website written in PHP with a MySQL database backend, in

conjunction with a team of other developers consisting of both fulltime staff and

volunteers.

Additional responsibilities:

Some community management; facilitating communication between management, staff, and

players.

Developing and instituting best practices for testing, coding and development, including

a coding standard, best use of version control, etc.

Planning technical development and rollout of new features.

Open Source and Hobbyist CommitmentsIndependent developer, Qt

(2010 - Present)

Qt is a development framework for applications and platform software, covering a

multitude of platforms, both desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux) as well as mobile platforms,

such as Android, Blackberry, iOS, Symbian, MeeGo and more

Qt gained my interest in 2008 as a good platform for fast, efficient development of high

performance, high quality software.

I gained an early interest in submitting patches to Qt when it launched an open

repository, as well as working on helping Qt become a more open project through such

initiatives as creating my own community build/constant integration system, and helping to

devise the governance model for the Qt Project to operate in a fully open manner.

My interests in Qt are wide and esoteric, from QtCore (data containers, I/O, the 'meat'

of everything) to QtNetwork (performance of sockets), QtGui (performance of rendering) and

generally anything I feel like eyeing over on a day to day basis.

For an overview of things I'm concentrating on in Qt at the moment, take a look at my

dashboard in Gerrit, Qt's code review interface.

I was nominated in December 2011, and successfully accepted, as one of the first non-

Nokia 'approvers' to the Qt Project (meaning I have the responsibility of reviewing and

integrating contributions from the wider Qt community)

I also do many things in the wider Qt ecosystem that aren't directly involved in working

on Qt itself. One example of this work in recent times was my porting the QML components

used in the interface of the Nokia N9.

video of MeeGo QML components running on BlackBerry PlayBook

lipstick

(

2011 - Present)

Lipstick is a Qt / QML solution for easily creating user experiences for mobile devices.

My intention is to use this to create new and compelling interfaces for Nemo Mobile.

a very early video of a lipstick-based UI

I have recently picked up the ideas in lipstick and been applying them to working with

QML / QtWayland in order to create a compelling homescreen easily that actually functions

as a real homescreen with a modern rendering stack. The work-in-progress results can be

seen in the following videos. My target goal is to create something similar to the Maemo 5

interface used on the Nokia N900.

Some example videos:

opening and closing wayland clients

early days of running in a VM, on top of Mer, using llvmpipe

widgets that rotate and resize smoothly

a UI that rotates and resizes smoothly

Independant developer, Mer

(2009 - Present)

I was one of the early contributors to the Mer project, helping write & proof the initial

announcement of the project.

I offer a lot of expertise to the Mer project primarily focusing around Qt, graphics, and

QML. Most recently, I have also been helping in prototyping creation of products using Qt

5 / QtQuick 2.0 on top of an experimental lightweight busybox-based core.

My primary focus is to provide a highly optimised, best-of-breed environment to run

software on top of, pre-tuned for as much hardware as possible so that vendors don't need

to worry so much about it.

Nemo Mobile

(2011 - Present)

Nemo Mobile is an open source, community continuation of the MeeGo Handset work, based on

top of a Mer core.

I'm one of the core developers for Nemo Mobile. This involves many things, including but

not limited to, designing new applications and middleware, fixing bugs (both in our own,

and other middleware) in order to provide a smooth, appealing user experience.

As some examples of what I have been working on recently, I have been working on new

contacts and messaging applications, using QML & Qt Components to replace the aging, hard

to maintain MTF-based apps originally from Intel.

Creator, Saesu

(2010 - Present)

Saesu is a framework for enabling distributed data storage for applications, especially

mobile applications. It provides a document based datastore, which incorporates additional

metadata to enable synchronisation, both online and healing after being offline, with an

unlimited number of devices on an unlimited number of local networks, using zeroconf for

discovery.

It may one day also implement file synchronisation using directory and file hashing and

block based differencing for minimal transfers.

a video demonstrating data synchronisation using Saesu

The contacts in this demonstration are automatically synchronised between as many

machines are on the network - I gave a live demonstration of this (slightly changed) with

two tablets and a laptop during the keynote at the MeeGo Conference 2011, in San

Francisco.

The demo is a simple QML user interface using Saesu for data storage.

Lead Developer, InspIRCd

(2003 - January 2010)

InspIRCd is an extensible, high performance (over 80,000 connections in a single threaded

daemon), chat service, written in C++.

My involvement was with public relations management, coding, development, triaging bugs -

whilst working with a team including many other developers and nontechnical people.

InspIRCd is the second most popular server software of its type in use today, deployed on

hundreds of servers.

I left the project (in good hands) in 2010 in order to seek out new challenges. I have

recently rejoined the project strictly aiming to help with release management issues and

helping to shepherd new talent to keep things rolling on.

Other Projects

I have contributed patches to many pieces of software over the years, for more

information on some of them, please see my Ohloh profile, my github account, and my

Gitorious profile.

Awards

Information Technology

Nokia Qt Certified Specialist

Passed advanced widget UI certification

Passed advanced C++ in Qt certification

Nokia Qt Certified Developer

Passed basic Qt certification

Distinction in Software Development

Distinction in Information Processing and Technology

c1987-2012 Robin Burchell

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