My name is Chris Venter and I am a C++ developer and Electronic Engineer. I have lived and worked in three different countries on three seperate continents, and can speak Afrikaans, English and German.
I was born in 1976 and grew up in Roodepoort, South Africa. I attended Florida Hoërskool and Hoërskool Linden, and after that the University of Stellenbosch, where I studied Electric & Electronic Engineering.
After receiving my Master's Degree in Electronic Engineering (Cum Laude) I left for Germany where I started work as a Software Engineer at Siemens Medical Solutions in Forchheim, Bavaria.
I stayed at Siemens for 4 years until 2006, and then left for South Africa, where I stayed and worked for a couple of months before moving to Melbourne (Australia). In Melbourne I worked for 2 years at a small financial start-up firm, which unfortunately failed.
Right now I am working for an environmental engineering firm in the Melbourne CBD.
I am currently working as a Software Engineer for Synergetics Environmental Engineering. We work as consultants in the environmental engineering field, specifically with regards to monitoring and controlling emissions for our clients.
Most of the programming I do is in C/C++, but there is a smattering of Python involved. In the near future we may be dealing with a lot of Matlab as well. The really cool thing is that I am working in a Cygwin environment (under Windows XP), but I have been given the go-ahead to switch to a complete Linux environment.
I worked for 2 years at AFTA as a Software Engineer. I was responsible for integrating an algorithm, developed by an in-house specialist in Matlab, into a 24/7 trading system, for remote online use by traders to help them make accurate and informed trades. Other tasks included writing automatic notification emailling code and developing and expanding the data capture method used by the algorithm
I worked mainly with Matlab (up to version 2008a), but used Perl and MySQL as well.
I did 2 months of contract work at Audio Auditing in South Africa. Audio Auditing is a broadcast monitoring company. Essentially they provide a watermarking service for content, which enables them to track when and where that content was broadcast, and do an independent accounting for the client.
My responsibility was to improveme the data transfer between remote secure servers and to update the web gui interface with which to control these transfers. The backend work was done with commandline Linux tools such as Bash, SSL and wget. The frontend work was done with PHP, Javascript and XML.
I worked at Siemens Medical Solutions in Forchheim (Germany) for 4 years on Windows XP, developing applications as a Senior Software Engineer. These applications are used by doctors to interact with the huge datasets from Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in 3D:
My areas of responsibility was on the backend side of the client-server model used in the syngo framework. I worked on the general application architecture and design, database communication, and storing/retrieving of application state. We used ClearCase for code management, Rational Rose for design and some documentation, and Visual C++ for programming and debugging
I worked part time for ODI for a year while studying. They hired me as a programmer, to develop a web-based prototype accounting system for use with the 20 Keys product.
The prototype was developed on Linux using Apache, PHP and MySQL, but was installed and ran on a number of Windows installations. After the prototype was developed, I handed off further development of the production system to Obsidian.
I specialise in C++. It is my tool of choice. On Linux I use GCC together with GNU Make to do most of my hobby coding (see the project links in the sidebar). Some of the languages and environments I have experience with include
Under Linux I am comfortable with the Bash shell. I use both CVS and Subversion to manage projects.
I have been using Linux (Redhat 4.2 at the time) since 1998, and have been a keen user, developer and (to anyone who would listen) vocalist of the platform ever since. I am currently running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.
I love programming, and do it as a hobby. Most nights will find me sitting at the computer, doing anything from microcontroller programming (using my Arduino), hacking away at a multimedia application, playing around with lisp-like languages, writing small games or figuring out graphics techniques with OpenGL.
Some of my code is available and open-sourced, mostly using Sourceforge.net or Google Code as repositories (See the Projects sidebar for details).
The rest of my code isn't, simply because it hasn't been released yet :)
I surf, snowboard and skateboard (a little bit). Some interesting places where I have surfed include Brittany (France), the northern coast of Ireland, the western and southern coasts of South Africa, the Victorian coastline of Australia, the southern coastline of West Java and a spot in New Zealand.
Having lived for 4 years in Germany I picked up snowboarding and alpine mountaineering. I have climbed a couple of peaks including Mt Blanc, Piz Palü and the Lenzspitze, and have snowboarded (both resort and backcountry) in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and Italy.
Rock climbing is another favourite sport. I started sport climbing on sandstone in Cape Town, and during my stay in Germany I mostly climbed limestone in the Frankenjura, but I also travelled to Finale Ligure in Italy and Fontainebleau in France.
While in school I attended Judo classes, and received a brown belt before quitting. I briefly trained again while at University. Currently I am doing Kimekai karate, and am preparing for my next (orange belt) grading in March 2009.
I am a hobby photographer, and have a photo album at Picasa and a gallery at Deviantart. In general I like making things: painting t-shirts, drawing, using clay, modelling and painting figurines... the list goes on!
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