About

About me

I’m Ian Slinger. I live in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia with my wife, the remnants of our brood who haven’t already struck out into the world for themselves, and a floating contingent of foster children to keep us on our toes. I’m a husband, father, grandfather and computer geek… mostly in that order.

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My Stuff

I’ve been entranced by computing since I encountered my first machine in the seventies. To this day I still get a kick out of making the lights flash and the systems buzz.

I first got my hands on a computer in a trainee course around 1975. It was a fridge-size monster programmed with mark-sense cards but it sparked a passion for software that led me to telco development roles in Fortran on Honeywell and Control Data systems.

Then came the “microprocessor” and everything changed. With a modest background in electronics I was able to cobble together a living, breathing computer of my own. In 1979 that was like building your own gene sequencer would be today – really cool but what the hell would you do with such a thing?

Since then I’ve explored Z80 assembler (There wasn’t much choice anyway in 1979), C, C++ in the hope that it was next logical step from C (…shudder… boy was I wrong), Java, and a motley assortment of side distractions such as Pascal and Visual Basic.

I’ve now settled for a comfortable mix of dynamic languages such as Python.

I’m still looking for that elusive, hyper productive language and I keep finding myself drawn to various flavours of Lisp such as Clojure. When I mention that to some software people they go all quiet as if I’m considering joining a cult, so I’m keeping it to myself.

I spent twenty years banging my head against Microsoft Windows. I kept expecting it to get better, but it turns out the solution was to “Stop Doing That”. I’m now ensconced in a comfortable world of Unix: Linux, MacOS, Raspbian and FreeBSD. My only regret is that I didn’t make the obvious leap twenty years ago.