Mike Birch - Writer, Adventurer, Software Engineer.

May, 2019 and the start of a new life (the fifth so far, I think). I have lived across the UK, in Western Washington and Maui. After 25 years in the US, working for Microsoft and then as a technical consultant throught the Bush and Trump years, I have returned to work back in the UK and Europe. Presently, I am based near Edinburgh - it seemed as good a landing spot as any.

Of course, this change involves a hasty rework of my site and resumé so it is presently somewhat skeletal. It is, however, XML and data based - horrendous for search engine ranking but interesting to monitor the changing indexing strategies used by the major ones.

I am active in the open source/Linux community and spend much of my time working on data extrapolation and AI. I am always amused by the repetitive nature of the industry with cloud computing and embedded systems mirroring the old mainframe and 8-bit micro technology when most embedded hardware has higher specs than the machines out of which we used to squeeze every last clock cycle and byte of memory. Microsoft themselves couldn't believe that I managed to get a C++ module wrangler into 4Kb of memory - my boss did say to make it as small as possible. He's lucky he didn't get it in assembler!

I'm not a chemist, mechanical or electrical engineer or UI designer. What I am is a software design engineer with enough knowledge of these fields to come up with near-optimal solutions to practical problems. Thanks to the dearth of cheap IC boards and components, there are very few devices that cannot be recreated in a better manner with a Raspberry Pi and/or an Arduino or two. For example, the "dinosaur" board responsible for the ignition and firing of the propane heater in an RV costs $100, breaks frequently and has to be thrown out in its entirety and replaced. Nowadays, you can easily program your own using $10 of parts from China. I can fix it, I own it, it's mine - I like that!

Embedded systems definitely easier these days. I've used C and ARM assembler on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi either with Gnome or a Linux kernel compiled from scratch where more resources but no display is required. Whether it's a climatic thermoststat, a thermostat for a walk-in freezer (far easier to fix the next time it breaks) or even an indicator blinker - repairable hardware is finally here.

If you are a fan of a certain genre of science fiction (one of which the US government does not approve), then you may be familiar with my work, albeit under a nom de plume. My writing occurs during down-time since it seems to use the same areas of the brain as coding but in a different way. Tryinjg to mix the two results in either uninspired code or tepid prose, neither of which are acceptable, and so at any given time I tend to be working on one or the other.

I have also worked on a few crash guides, which is an entirely different kind of writing. Not a book, documentation or tutorial (although they do contain links to those) but the bare-bones concepts required to get an already-competent developer up and running in a new environment. Like many of my projects, they are what I wished was available when I first started and, especially in the open source OS community, are often only available by going through the code itself. Unfortunately, with the rapid pace of development, this can give them a very short shelf-life.