A little backgound

I’m Simon Kinsella, web-developer, geek, sometime-consultant, freelancer and co-founder of Bluefire Systems and phuser.com.

At the moment I’m on a web development contract which takes most of my time.   Prior to that, my last big outing was Phuser, a project funded by myself and my partner in crime, George Black.  Phuser offers private shared discussion spaces for small groups and teams.  Privacy and control are central to the design of Phuser and was one of our biggest design and technical challenges. Phuser continues to tick along nicely although active development is on hold for a little while.  Our work is not over yet, that’s for sure!

As the sole developer for Phuser, it fell to me to take care of the technology issues that are the bread-and-butter of any start-up web enterprise. Tech design, implementation, DBA, platform, and a spot of post-prandial sysadmin-ing – it’s all in a days work for your intrepid host.  This practical experience has put me in very good stead when dealing with other people’s web woes

My web roots are in the open-source LAMP technologies.  Mainstream LAMP is fine but left to my own devices I always favour FreeBSD and PostgreSQL over Linux and MySQL.  Over the years I’ve been continually impressed by the maturity, performance and project community ethos of these two superb projects.  I’m also interested in security, crypto, privacy and digital freedom.

About voidstar

As every C programmer knows, void * is a pointer to the unknown. Unbounded rewards and perils await.