Dec 17
Who am I?
My name is Maciek Talaska. I am nearly 30 year old male. I have spent most of my life in the southern Poland.
My father bought me first computer (Commoder 64) when I was 12 . I wrote my first program (a shooting submarine drawn using ASCII) after half a year of almost non-stop gaming ;) I got it. I knew I wanted to become a computer programmer. And I am one today.
In high school I became interested in real-time calculated computer graphics. As computers then were not as fast as they are today, I got to learn Assembly language (for x86 – at that time I was the proud owner of 486 dx2 80MHz ;) I have created some cool graphics effects – starting from the most simple ones (different types of scrolls, wobblers and other). I started to learn C and later C++ (Pascal as a language was a bit awkward to me because of its assignment syntax; I found C/C++ sytanx more compact and convenient).
Studying was a great time for me. I learned a lot, and thanks to my lecturers and some of my friends broaden my programming horizons. I became interested in Java programming, but gave it up after couple of months (I have developed a few projects using Java: some desktop applications, and JSP based web app that I am the most proud of) – .net became the main technology of interest for me. I was the founder of Student Science Society on Computer Department I was studying. The main goal of the Student Society was to help to learn .net platform and broaden our knowledge concerning programming using .net (everything started arround 2003/2004, so there were not many student familiar with .net). After couple of months I was choosen by Microsoft Poland to be Student Consultant – I was doing exactly the same things, but I got support from Microsoft (we got some books, some MS Techonoly Specialist came to our department and gave lectures…). As a Student Consultant I took part in developing polish .net programmers portal (codeguru.pl).
While studying I started to work as a computer programmer (my dream finally became true ;) I have learned a lot, and realized that developing real software differs a lot from ‘just coding’. I started to value quality oriented approach in the field of programming (code maintenance, code quality: unit testing, test driven development, continuous integration…).
I have about 3 years of commercial c# programming experience (mostly desktop applications, c# 1.1 – c# 3.0). My main fields of interest are:
- GUI design & programming (I’ve used a lot of GUI toolkits and libraries: Qt, MFC, GTK, WindowsForms, WPF – just to name a few).
- real-time calculated graphics (I have written some graphics effects using DirectX, OpenGL, Managed DirectX. At the moment I am learning XNA).
- concurrency & parallel programming – not only using ParallelFX but also CUDA
- C# / .NET programming as general
- recently I am more and more interested in functional programming (I am going to take a deeper look into F# and maybe Haskell or OCaml)
Working in IT companies I had a chance to learn a bit about Agile approach to software development. I must admint that this changed the way I think about managing IT projects. In my opion there are dozen of things in Agile / XP approach that any company may try out, and I am sure, that even if they do not decide to switch completely into Agile, such things as Daily StandUps will surely help develop better software.
I am eager to learn new things, and I think that I am fast learner.
I have been living in UK since the end of April 2009. I have spent first couple of months in London (working for one of IT companies located in North London) and in the end of October 2009 I have moved to Manchester area to work for one of the game companies located there. I hope that my knowledge and experience will be valuable for my company and that I will be able to add a significant value to the products.
Maciek Talaska
