The FlamingSpork

The home page of Stewart Smith styled in that unforgettable "I am a programmer that can't be bothered making a fancy-dancing web site" style.

What's Here?

• My Weblog, Ramblings
• Talks that I've given at various places
• Free Software Projects:
  • MemberDB - A Membership Database. Used by Linux Australia among others.
  • libeatmydata - A LD_PRELOAD library for disabling fsync - making your programs no longer crash-safe. Very useful in making test suites run faster.
  • Popcon-Historical - A small project of mine to track historical trends in the popcon data from Debian/Ubuntu
• For Photos, check out my Flickr photostream.
• Junkcode - misc bits of code that don't really fit anywhere.
• Stewart on Launchpad - where you can find some projects I am/have been involved with
• Stewart on GitHub
• Stewart on GitHub (IBM Persona) - I have a separate account for my IBM related work

Bio

Stewart Smith works in the Linux Technology Center at IBM on OpenPower firmware, the Linux Kernel and related projects. He has the title OPAL Architect due to his primary focus on OPAL firmware. Previously he was the Director of Software Architecture at Percona and prior to that he worked for Rackspace, hacking on the Drizzle Database Server. He's previously worked for MySQL and Sun on MySQL Cluster and Drizzle. He is often found hacking on various free software projects, running, taking photos, brewing and drinking beer (or whisky) and talking at conferences. He misses the smell of Kodachrome.

Some of the things I'm involved with at the moment include:

• PowerLinux - Linux on POWER.
• OpenPower Firmware - including skiboot which provides the OpenPower Abstraction Layer (OPAL)
• Ozlabs - to quote: Stewart Smith joined IBM to work on skiboot and "cause trouble"

In the past, I have been involved in:

• Drizzle - A Database Server for the Cloud.
• HailDB - A relational database in shared library form. Where I help make sure a good API directly to InnoDB continues to exist.
• MemberDB - my Membership database project
• CryptoParty - teach people how to use encryption and protect their privacy in a fun party-like atmosphere.
• Percona - I worked for Percona..
• Rackspace - I worked for Rackspace Cloud on Drizzle and related projects.
• LUV - Linux Users of Victoria - I've been on the board and am currently an active member
• Linux Australia - A community group which (among other things) organises linux.conf.au. I was the Vice President for 2003 and 2004 and Ordinary Committe Member for 2005-2006. In 2007, I was involved with linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne. In 2008 and 2009 I was the President.
• Sun Microsystems Inc - my former employer (before they became Oracle), where I worked on MySQL Cluster as a Senior Software Engineer and later Drizzle
• MySQL AB - my former employer, where I worked on MySQL Cluster as a Senior Software Engineer.
• No Software Patents - the very important fight against software patents.
• Linux Australia's position on the FTA - Chapter 17 of the AU-US Trade Agreement aren't good for Open Source.
• SGI - I used to work there.
• OpenDarwin - (more specifically, DarwinPorts) a BSD ports like architecture for MacOS X and Darwin. I no longer run MacOS X regularly.
• I was a Monash Univ, Honours Student in Computer Science. You can see my honors stuff up on the web at /honors/.
• I became an Honorary Member of the Monash Uni CSSE Student Club in 2002 after having been actively involved in it since arriving at Monash (2000). I plan to still be casually involved (even though I am no longer at Monash) purely in an advisory role.
• YoYo and GAUNIX - The Monash Uni General Access UNIX group, which runs the YoYo machine (aptly named after the reliability of the original hardware). I learnt how much Tru64 sucks here, and how to move it to FreeBSD. Then, I learned how much FreeBSD really does irritate me.

Contact Information

You can reach me via email by mailing stewart at flamingspork dot com. I can also be found as stewart on FreeNode.

Mobile (Cell) phone is: +61 438 844 332