fosdem.org

I'm a hacker, programmer, software developer. I am 42, originally from Finland, and now live in Manchester, UK. I've been programming computers since 1984. I read the GNU Manifesto in 1986, but didn't really become interested in software freedom until 1988, when I got into university and got access to the Internet.

While at university I got involved in kicking off Linux, co-founding the Linux Documentation Project and writing one of their initial books, co-moderating comp.os.linux.announce, joining the Debian project, generally messing about. Since then, I've worked in a number of places, doing all sorts of hackery kinds of things, such as database engine development, language design and implementation,
embedded development, Internet server development, etc. I have had a ton of personal projects, too, some of which have been released.
My current personal project is Obnam, a backup program.

The one long-term constant has been my participation in the Debian project as a package maintainer. I've done a bunch of different things for Debian, and generally poked my nose in places. This has
given me a good sense of the job of developing and maintaining a large Linux distribution.

I now work for Codethink, in Manchester. We do many kinds of software development for clients. Last year, we started a new embedded systems project, Baserock, in which we try to solve all the problems we see with the way Linux embedded development is currently done.

My home page is at http://liw.fi/ for more information.