About Me

I grew up in Nepean, a suburb of Ottawa, Canada, before moving to Waterloo to do my Bachelors in Engineering. I then moved to Montreal to study electrical engineering at McGill where I worked on a performance versus complexity tradoff for multi-antenna wireless signals. I've lived in Montreal ever since.

For money I do freelance web design work with Drupal, Joomla, and Ruby on Rails as well as freelance hardware design, mostly using field-programmable-gate-arrays (FPGAs). I am a member of the Armadeus association. These days the focus of most of my technical projects is to use open technology to improve the lives of moderate consumers.

I believe in the importance of friendship, the arts, tolerance, innovative solutions, collaboration, thoughtful consumption, and community. I try, but fail frequently, to live within these ideals.

I've failed to live up to my values most seriously by:

• not having published my Master's research.
• working on my technical projects alone and failing to share the source code.
• owning a car.
• wasting a lot of time scheming about how to create a lucrative business, rather than creating useful solutions.
• never having contributed to the free software movement.

Since 2002 I've lived in the tightly-knit community of NDG in Montreal. NDG is economically diverse, multicultural, bike-friendly, community-oriented, and tolerant. During this period I have worked 2 jobs based in Ottawa but haven't wanted to de-root myself from this community. This has also been the place where I've met my love and partner but also the place where I lost my best friend, Greg, who died in a car accident north of Montreal in 2008.

Check out a video of me dancing at the Monument National in Montreal - my first and only dance triumph. (Choreographed by: Katarzyna Ignatowska)