109 lines
5.5 KiB
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109 lines
5.5 KiB
Text
---
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title: About
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author: hannes
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tags: overview, myself, background
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---
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## What is a `full stack engineer`?
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Analysing the word literally, we should start with silicon and some electrons,
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maybe a soldering iron, and engineer everything all the way up to your favourite
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mail client.
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While I know how to solder, I don't plan to write about hardware in here. I'll
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assume that off-the-shelf hardware (arm/amd64) is available and trustworthy.
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Read the [Intel x86 considered
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harmful](http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf) paper in
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case you're interested in trustworthyness of hardware.
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My current obsession is to enable people to take back control over their data:
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simple to setup, secure, decentralised infrastructure. We're not there yet,
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which also means I've plenty of projects :).
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I will write about those projects, which cover topics on various layers above
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hardware.
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### Myself
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I'm a [hacker](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html) (in the original
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sense of the word), 3X years old. Back in 199X, my family bought a PC. It came
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with MS-DOS installed, I also remember Windows 3.1 (likely on a later computer).
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This didn't really hook me into computers, but over the years I started with
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friends to modify some computer games (e.g. modifying text of Civilization). I
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first encountered programming in high school around 1995: Borland's Turbo Pascal
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(which chased me for several years).
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In my spare time, I'm not only a hacker, but also a barista. I like to travel
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and repair my recumbent bicycle.
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Fast forwarding a bit, I learned about the operating system Linux (starting with
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SUSE 6.4) and got hooked (using YaST, setting up basic networking
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(NFS/YP/Samba)). I joined the [Chaos computer club](https://www.ccc.de) around
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2000. I learned a bit Perl, PHP, and also FreeBSD (I still use FreeBSD-CURRENT
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on my laptop). I helped with [analysing a voting
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computer](http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl) in the Netherlands, and some
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[art installations](http://blinkenlights.net/) in Berlin and Paris. There were
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several annual Chaos Communication Congresses where I setup the network
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(backbone, access layer, wireless, service (DHCP/DNS)), struggling with mainly
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Cisco hardware from their demo pool, but also some HP, Force10, Juniper
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equipment.
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In the early 200X I started to program a lot of [Dylan](https://opendylan.org),
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a LISP dialect (dynamic, multiple inheritance, object-oriented), which even
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resulted in a [TCP/IP
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implementation](https://github.com/dylan-hackers/network-night-vision/).
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I got really excited about programming languages and type theory (thanks to
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[types and programming languages](https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/), an
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excellent book); a key event for me was for sure ICFP in 2005. I wondered how a
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[gradually typed](http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/jsiek/what-is-gradual-typing/)
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Dylan would look like. I spent some effort on that, leading to a master thesis,
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but the result was not too convincing (too slow, type system not sound).
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Additionally, Dylan has a small community, which has a hard time to maintain the
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self-hosted compiler and IDE.
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During my studies I met [Peter Sestoft](http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/).
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After half a year off in New Zealand (working on formalising some type systems),
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I started a PhD in a very ambitious research project "Tools and methods for
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scalable software verification" (mechanised proofs of the functional correctness
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of imperative code) with Peter and [Lars Birkedal](http://cs.au.dk/~birke/).
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The idea was great, the project was fun, but we ended with 3000 lines of proof
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script for a 100 line Java program. The Java program was taken off-the-shelf,
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several times refactored, and most of its shared mutable state was removed. The
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proof script was in Coq, using our higher-order separation logic.
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I concluded two things: formal verification is hard and usually not applicable
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for off-the-shelf software. *Since we have to rewrite the software anyways, why
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not do it in a declarative way?*
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Some artifacts from that time are still around: an [eclipse plugin for
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Coq](https://coqoon.github.io/), I also started (with David) the [idris-mode for
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emacs](https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-mode). Idris is a depedently
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typed programming language (you can express richer types), actively being
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researched (I would not consider it production ready yet, needs more work on a
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faster runtime, and libraries).
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After I finished my PhD, I decided to slack off for some time to make decent
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espresso. I ended up spending the winter (beginning of 2014) in Mirleft,
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Morocco. A good friend of mine pointed me to [MirageOS](https://mirage.io), a
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clean-slate operating system written in the high-level language OCaml. I got
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hooked pretty fast, after some experience with LISP machines I imagined a modern
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OS written in a homogenous functional programming language.
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MirageOS had various bits and pieces into place, including infrastructure for
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building and testing (and a neat self-hosted website). A big gap was security.
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No access control, no secure sockets layer, nothing. This will be the topic of
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another post.
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OCaml is both academically and commercially used, compiles to native code, has a
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fast runtime, and the community is big enough that several people are working on
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the compiler full-time.
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### Links
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You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/h4nnes), and on
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[GitHub](https://github.com/hannesm). I also have an [academic web
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site](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~hm519/) in case you're interested.
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No comments here, but you can open issues on the [data repository on
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GitHub](https://github.com/hannesm/hannes.nqsb.io).
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