User:Gigaherz

Profile

Name: David Quintana

IRC Nick: gigaherz

E-Mail: gigaherz [at] gmail.com

Interests and hobbies: I love tinkering and understanding how things work. I love creating new things "from nothing". This translated into software development on both low level (Operating Systems and system programming) and high level (Game Development), occasionally I draw (badly), write (somewhat better).

I love puzzle games (such as Klonoa), action/adventure games (such as the Batman Arkham series) and construction games (Minecraft). I dislike guns and unwarranted violence (that includes PvP in games).

Work experience: Aside from some factory work I did to pay my studies, I have had jobs in AI-related software development (route planning, container loading), Operating Systems (as part of a scholarship with the ReactOS project), and I'm trying to get started with game development.

My story with ReactOS

As I mentioned above, I love understanding how things work, and creating new things. At one point, I started researching how operating systems work, and looking for opensource operating systems that I could toy with. I did toy around with Linux, but it was too large and not fit for my tastes, so I looked at other toy projects including v2_os and Menuet OS. It was around this time that I discovered ReactOS.

I didn't pay much attention to it initially, since I wanted something small that I could play around with, but eventually curiosity won, and I tested it. Ever since then, I have been following the project, until in 2009 I found a bug that I managed to fix on my own, and made a patch for it. This changed the way I saw the project, and it was no longer the scary beast that it had been.

A few years later, after some more patches and a dose of experience from my studies and my tinkering, I was offered the opportunity to start a full-time contract with the project. So I took the chance and never regretted it.

This contract involved continuing the development of the Shell components of ReactOS, so that we could replace the rudimentary file browser with properly integrated components following the design of the Windows equivalents. The contract lasted for a bit over a year, when I decided that I needed a change in my life. I decided to end the existing contract and start a new task, part time so that it didn't consume so much of my energy, in order to have time for the gamedev projects I had been putting off for many years.

As of the time of writing, I'm still in the middle of this change, so time will tell what my next task will be.