About Me
Some background: I'm 26 years old, married, living in Tel Aviv. I'll be graduating this year from the Tel Aviv University, where I study Computer Science and Generative Linguistics (aiming at the vicinity of computational linguistics). I currently work for IBM XIV, where I serve as a technical focal point and do all sorts of stuff, mostly in the fields of RPC, automation, and design methodologies.
Computers and I go a long way back; I started with QBasic on DOS at the age of 10, where I got an intimate acquaintance with the low-level world, and from there I climbed up to more modern languages and environments. Today my arsenal includes of nearly every popular language (C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET) and platform (Linux/POSIX, Windows) at a very high level of proficiency -- but my specialty is none other than Python. I've been a proud pythonista since 2003, and it's been my language of choice ever since; I've also contributed code to the interpreter, and was actively involved in the development of the language. Other than programming per-se, I also have extensive knowledge of operating system internals, file systems and network protocols.
On the one hand, I come from the pragmatic side of getting things done and refraining from academic yadda-yadda, but I'm also very much into theoretic stuff. Less of an algorithmic-kind-of-person, I'm mostly concerned with computational theory, computational models and their expressive power, and abstract algebra. I'm in the process of (every-so-slowly) learning Haskell, an experience I consider life-changing. Haskell has taught me a lot about programming methodologies and the power of generalization; in fact, I try to implement many of the concepts I learn there in other languages -- being practical, again.
My fields of interest today include Domain Specific Languages, in the form of in-language combinators (for instance, parsing or UI combinators); transparent networking; experimental operating systems (such as Singularity); reactive programming using coroutines (versus the non-scalable multithreaded approach); and generally, finding better ways to automate and generalize mundane tasks.
On my less geeky side, I enjoy (at no particular order): hanging around good people, reading books (mostly fiction), traveling the world, beer and wine, music (ranges from Fiona Apple to Tool), learning new random things (spending hours wandering around Wikipedia), working out, Italian cooking (and Italy in general), growing plants, xkcd, and my lovely wife.
Contact
You can contact me by email at tomerfiliba@gmail.com
