About me

Hi! I'm Rob Day, a software engineer based in the UK.

I've been writing code in some form since 2002 when I got my first copy of "Learning Perl", professionally (at Metaswitch Networks in London) since 2011, and have been an engineering manager in some sense since 2015. Before becoming a professional programmer I studied Ancient and Modern History at Oxford.

This is my personal blog - everything here is my personal view, not my employer's. I generally blog about interesting things I've encountered in open-source work - rarely if ever about telecoms or telecoms software (which is my day job) directly.

My main working languages are C/C++ and Python, although I'm trying to deliberately increase the amount of Rust I understand and write, and I've also done bits and pieces in perl, Ruby, Clojure and Go.

My usual toolchain is:

• zsh plus a set of plugins managed through antigen
• vim (again, plus plugins, my favourite of which is ALE)
• ripgrep (rather than any 'proper tooling' like ctags)
• firefox for web browsing
• reasonably heavy use of Docker

My main laptop is a 2016 Macbook Air for portability plus UNIX heritage, but I have a Thinkpad runing Arch Linux for doing serious development (and/or development requiring Linux), and a Raspberry Pi B+ which I SSH into for some use-cases that are awkward with laptops (e.g. managing backups with multiple USB hard drives connected).