Disclaimer: this page is several years old.

My name is Benoit Sigoure (aka tsuna), I'm a software engineer
(resume) and a Free Software developer (when I have time).  I spend
most of time programming.  I believe in the value of Free Software,
and I like communities of developers involved.  It's one of the
rare place where you get a chance to learn a lot and work with
knowledgeable people striving for quality.  Many Free software
projects are known for their very high coding standards.  I think
it's extremely rare to find such communities of developers in
companies.  Which is odd, since that's where people are paid to
Do The Right Things.

Anyways, back to me.  First off, I'm obviously not good at designing
GUIs (as you could guess from this page).  My domains of interest are
primarily R&D in Distributed Systems, Programming Languages, Compilation
Theory, Type Systems, Program Transformation, Static Analysis.  I developed
some interest in image processing, especially on probabilistic methods (such
as Markov fields).  Speech processing also interests me because it involves
similar methods.  I also like system (low level) programming and OS
implementation details (schedulers, memory manager, this sort of things).

I like:
  - Free software (I'm not a GNU extremist, I'm OK with other Open
    licenses, but I tend to promote the GPL or LGPL).
  - (Strongly) typed programming languages.  Interpreted languages
    such as Perl, Ruby, Python or, worse, PHP, tend to unnerve me
    because they almost systematically lead to unreliable code, even
    though they also have other advantages.
  - To tackle interesting R&D challenges.  For this reason,
    programming websites, for example, is something I tend to find
    utterly boring and uninteresting.  Implementing clever algorithms
    or methods discussed in scientific papers is much more fun.

I don't like / hate:
  - Closed source systems that don't do what I need.  OS X (and more
    generally speaking Apple products) doesn't count here, because
    even though it's proprietary software, I find this OS superior
    to other existing OSes *for a laptop*.  In particular, it's a lot
    better than GNU/Linux, sadly.  At least, that's my opinion.  Once
    GNU/Linux catches up on OS X, I'll switch back to this OS.
  - SVN is definitely a bad SCM, it's sad that it's so much widespread.
    I don't recommend it and I don't like it (I used to, though).
  - Perforce is also a terrible SCM.  It's like SVN except it costs money.
  - Windows and, more generally speaking most Microsoft products, is
    definitely something I try to avoid as much as possible.  I care
    about Windows portability, even though it's a pain in the ass, but
    I find it utterly painful to work with this OS and Microsoft stuff.
  - Java.  Java is C++-for-dummies and is popular solely because Sun
    invested a lot of money to push it to universities.  Yesterday's
    students became today's programmers and project managers...  If the
    universities accepted it, it's because 1. they were given financial
    incentives (in cash or hardware etc.) and 2. "programming is hard"
    and teaching it is also hard (there are a lot of students in CS because
    it's a popular area but most of them aren't really that good) so
    a dumbed down version of C++ supported by a big corp was welcome.
    This way they could teach programming and OOP with Java (OMGWTFBBQ,
    Java is clearly not a language of choice to learn OOP!).  Oddly enough
    it's the first programming language I learned (unless JavaScript 1.3
    counts) back in 1999.
  - PHP.  Similarly, PHP became popular only due to the mediocrity of
    most programmers.  There are so many things that are Just Wrong about
    this language that I won't even bother trying to list them here.
    Ironically, PHP is also one of the first programming language I learned
    and in which I wrote a lot of code, back in the days of PHP3.

Many more things could be said / listed here, but if you're not yet
bored, you can still reach me by mail at
  <tsunanet at ... gmail dot com>

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