@fjzeit 6 min read
Biography
“A biography is not merely a chronicle of deeds, but a tapestry woven from the threads of choice, chance, and the ceaseless pursuit of meaning.”
About this Site
This site is mostly reflective in nature. I will use it to share longform thoughts from time to time. I am pseudonymous but you can call me FJ – which is pronounced “Fey”. You might recognise the nod to Red Dwarf in my full pseudonym. I choose to be pseudonymous for its simplicity. I want to be able to skirt close to real-world memories, experiences, and present day situations without having to be concerned about identifying companies nor individuals.
The rest of this bio will reflect on my career and offer some context for the content that might exist now or appear in the future. These are the only receipts I’m going to offer.
Professional Stuff
I’ve been a long-term generalist and a short-term specialist most of my career. It comes with the territory. As our career grows things change and we end up picking up a treasure trove of knowledge and experience, a lot of which ends up gathering dust in the back of our mind; waiting for the day it’s useful again. We specialise, then we generalise, repeat.
My primary skill is problem solving and producing quality changeable code. The act of coding has long-since become an unconscious competence tailored to the technology-du-jour. I’m pretty sure that building non-trivial systems in assembly language – an activity that demands structure and simplicity – helped with developing that skill, and I still apply a lot of the disciplines I learnt back then.
I’ve got to the point now where I don’t really care for the technology trends and supposedly “best practices”, I feel very strongly that we should solve the problem at hand in an effective and responsible way, and not pander to the echoes of hyper-critical voices, cargo-cultists, grifters on social media, nor the one-true-way junkies in the corporate world.
The most important measures of software success are suitability of purpose, time-to-market, low production defect rate, and how many people can easily modify and change what we create. Everything else is ancillary and if it helps with those goals in a specific circumstance then embrace it, otherwise discard it.
I’ve been working for over 30 years across embedded systems, word processing, real estate, speech recognition, investment banking, portfolio management, and risk. From shipping annually via actual truck to shipping weekly via virtual pipelines. Most of my roles have been as an independent contractor, some have been as an employee. I’ve worked in small software houses, mid-sizes businesses, national and global corporations, and a couple of successful start-ups.
I wrote my first automated test suite and worked in my first automated build process in the late 80s/early 90s. I think this exposure is probably a driver behind my preference for testability, changeability, and organic iterative test driven design.
One area that I am still quite passionate about is team development and leadership. I spent some time in mid-career moving into middle and higher management but I found the work less rewarding than working with others in the creative process. So I eventually dropped back to coding purely because it’s what I enjoy. The best career is the one with least “Monday morning feelings”.
I’m old now though and the energetic landscape of my past is better suited to the young. I am currently in – what I refer to as – a semi-retirement, applying my unconscious competences in a high value, high risk, global corporation and doing work that is heavily focused on correctness and predictability than it is on the hustle and “glamour” of the past.
It’s been an immensely rewarding journey. I might up the ante in a year or so, who knows.
Nerd Stuff
Like most people of my generation, I started young on 8-bit home computers, then upgraded to 16/32 bit before eventually owning a PC. My first computer had 1K of RAM, ran at 4Hz, and barely had a keyboard.
In terms of languages, I cut my teeth on BASIC as a kid, then C and assembler (68k and 8086) in my teens. The usual cast while studying (Pascal, Modula/2, COBOL, to name a few). Professionally, I have built systems in x86 assembly, C, C++, Java, Perl, C#, and Python, with various repeated trips through SQL – MSSQL, Oracle, Postgres, and ANSI standard, and some nosql offerings like MongoDB, Casandra, and CosmosDB. Of course, I know HTML/CSS/JS, and node, but rarely use them these days.
I’ve targeted embedded systems, servers, desktop, and mobile, although I have not yet done mobile development professionally. I’m comfortable using and targeting Linux (since Slackware 1.01), Windows (since 3.1), and MacOS (since Snow Leopard), although these days every server seems to end up in a Linux container. I still do some desktop development, mostly for Windows.
In terms of distributed systems, I’ve worked on embedded systems with bespoke busses, distributed systems over DCOM, and – of course – TCP/IP. I’ve built for n-tier, structure monolith, and microservices architectures. I used to consume RFCs for fun and rattle off experimental servers just to learn things. One of my favourite past-times was writing IRC bots, usually using server protocol.
On the use of LLMs and other tools
The work presented here is of my own making. The stories from my own memory, the code from my own mind, and the opinions from my own experience. However, it is 2025 and I do use AI/LLMs to speed up and simplify some tasks.
Writing
I am pretty sure that I will use an LLM to refine work on this site. When this occurs I will place a statement at the foot of each affected article. Any article that has no such statement is entirely from my own effort. I have no plans to ever auto-generate entire articles. But I might draft introductions and summaries, or perform proof reading and reviews using an LLM.
Research and Verification
I use grok in favour of search engines these days. I often refer to grok when researching topics or as a first port of call when verifying assumptions.
Coding
I have two modes of coding: deep focus hand crafting, and Lode Coding. If I post code on this site I’ll be sure to identify which method was used.
This Website’s Design
The original design was hand crafted by me. I have employed LLMs to modify many aspects, in particular the print layout and many responsive edge cases.