User:Tml

Table of contents 1 It's a wiki! 2 Tom McLaughlin 2.1 Who am I? 2.2 FreeBSD, Mono, and Me

It’s a wiki

Been a little time since I’ve played with a wiki. Thought I’d use this page to experiment

Tom McLaughlin

Who am I?

I’m Tom… Okay, maybe a little more than that is in order. I live outside Boston in Needham, Massachussetts. I have lived here for 2 and a half years and still do not know how to spell the name of the state I live in. The area I live in also seems to be Mono central since Ximian’s office is near me. I work in Norwood at MEDITECH Inc. as an Application Specialist support specialist. There I support our electronic claims software for hospital <-> insurance payor electronic claim EDI transaction communication. Uhhh, yeah… It really is as boring as it sounds. Basically I do customer support where I 1.) stare in amazement at some people 2.) watch as customers ignore me and wonder why things still don’t work and 3.) contemplate what purgatory really is. (I’m a really nice guy, just not a “people person”.) I transfer to Corporate Technology (IT) in a few months to be a junior admin. I’m psyched.

FreeBSD, Mono, and Me

Some obligatory bits about myself and Mono. I’m the FreeBSD port maintainer for Mono and the related apps. I am FreeBSD’s third Mono victi\^W maintainer. The port was initially mintained by the FreeBSD Gnome Team but dropped by them. The second port maintainer, John Merryweather Cooper, ran off to a remote area of Idaho where he could not be found after a few months. Since about August I’ve had the job.

Let me list my qualifications:

• I am a novice programmer, if you could even call me that.
• I have no C# experience… no C experience… and no OOP experience.
  (Heck, I have no experience with a language other than Bourne script.)
• I have a lot of time on my hands.

“There any many people more qualified than me for this job, but I’m the one that showed up.” -Me

That quote basically explains how I became FreeBSD’s Mono maintainer. One night I thought to myself, “Gee, I should really learn a programming language. That’s a good idea.” Liking Muine and knowing that Mono was maintainerless, I figured C# would be a good choice in spite of various FreeBSD specific issues. Like I said, I just showed up and got the job. :) Anyways, right now my Mono time is spent keeping the various ports up to date, trying to figure out what is causing Mono’s FreeBSD crashes in our libpthread, attempting to cajole a FreeBSD developer into looking at our problems, and oh… Trying to learn C# when I have the time.

That’s about it right now. Hopefully there will be more on this page in the future but I have ports to play with and need to add a BSD page to the site.