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So who is this Sol character anyways?
My real name is Jari Komppa, born in 1975, Finnish, and I've done my military service.
(Which just happens to be mandatory in Finland)
My CV is available as a pdf and odt.
Some endorsements are available as well.
References available upon request.
Awards
4th place at Assembly2005 combined demo competition in 2005
4th place at Assembly2002 combined demo competition in 2002
5th place at flipcode.com programming contest in 2000
3rd place at flipcode.com programming contest (twice) in 2000
7th place at Assembly2000 combined demo competition in 2000
2nd place at Assembly99 3d-accelerated demo competition in 1999
1st place at Assembly98 demo competition in 1998
Finalist, disccover game programming competition in 1998
Best technical implementation, disccover game programming competition in 1998
3rd place at Assembly97 demo competition in 1997
1st place at Assembly96 demo competition in 1996
History, hobbies
As a hobby, I code mostly in C++, currently mostly win32/directx stuff. In the past couple years
I've coded several win32 applications, mostly demos, such as
"Stuff I whacked together when I was bored" to Assembly2000
(7th place), "Traumatique" to Assembly1999 (2nd place), win32 port of "Gateways", my group's
Assembly1998 winning demo (in which I was the lead coder). As for Machines of Madness, 1st place at Assembly96, I only modelled one 3d scene.
I wrote the story in our Assembly2002 demo "fable".
I also coded one
game to Disccover game design/code contest in 1998. I've taken part of flipcode
coding contests, so far I've finished third twice and fifth once.
Before starting to code in C I used to code in Turbo Pascal (starting that habit on CP/M before
getting a PC), but once my projects grew too big for it I changed to C. Before Pascal I coded
in several dialects of basic. One of my early projects included a simple text adventure (with parser
and everything) - a 'port' of this adventure can be found under 'stuff'.
In 2000 I finally saw the light and made the transition from C to C++. I've also done some MFC stuff.
Other languages I've used include x86 assembler, Java, Lingo
(Macromedia director scripting language - I wrote a game
with shockwave to the www.pizzahut.fi site (which has finally been removed)),
PHP and ColdFusion using several
different dialects of SQL, and I know some Inform as well.
Apart from these I've used and built some scripting languages.
As for work history, once I finished my highschool I did my military service, and somewhat
to my surprise couldn't get to an university (where I would have got automatically with
my highschool papers if I would have applied BEFORE going to the army).
After being unemployed for 5 months and winning at Assembly1998 I suddenly had several
job offers. I took the job at Viherjuuren Verkkoviestintä (nowadays
Evia), where I did just about
every kind of project you can imagine that's connected to the web.
It was
a great learning experience, but I wanted a change, and once I got a job offer from Israel,
I ended up working at 3Dion as a java lead developer. 3Dion has since run
into financial trouble along with the other zillion dot-coms and has ceased to exist.
By the end of the year the situation in Israel had become rather unstable and I decided to move back to
Finland, where I was hired by Fathammer, where I'm designing
and leading the implementation of X-Forge Core, which enables cross-platform development of quite advanced 3d games on mobile platforms, such as Tapwave Zodiac, PocketPC, Symbian, etc.
Six years later, in 2006, I changed jobs, and joined ATI Finland. And AMD bought ATI promptly afterwards.
In the fall of 2004 I enrolled in EVTEK, the Espoo-Vantaa institute of technology, taking evening courses. If I survive the four or so years of school, I should be graduating as the finnish equivalent of Banchelor of Engineering. Entering school didn't mean that I would stop being full-time at work. I graduated on schedule in the spring of 2008, in the last graduation ceremony held at EVTEK (before they fused into Metropolia).
My other hobbies include reading English literature, and some of my favorite writers include Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's guide), Terry Prattchett (Discworld books), Robert Rankin (Brentford trilogy and others), Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time), William Gibson (Neuromancer etc), Larry Niven (Ringworld etc), Frederik Pohl (Heechee, Jem, Man Plus and truckload of others), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game, etc),
Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward etc), Raymond E. Feist (Magician, etc), etc.
I also write some stories every now and then.
I organized Text Mode Demo Competition over the internet for about 12 years, first on my own, and later on through tAAt ry, a nonprofitable organization in Finland aiming to promote making of demos. After seeing a clear decline in interest we decided to stop organizing it in 2008.
As an interesting side note, I noticed that some of my writing has appeared in the
jargon file - I can remember reading jargon file some ten years ago, and now I've contributed to it.. kind of funny feeling =)
The largest solo programming project I've done which has been released to the public is 'DEE' music disk interface called HORS, which consists of approximately 14000 rows of plain C code. (This simple program includes 'rather nice GUI', HTML-ish text renderer with multiple fonts, styles, images, imagemaps etc, mandelbrot zoomer, a worm game and lots of other stuff, all with internal multitasking). I ported HORS to windows finally in April 2002, and it can be downloaded from files
On IRC I sometimes hang around ircnet #coders with the nick Sol_HSA. I'm also on ICQ but when is another matter.. the number is 44620217.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GE/IT d- s: a C++$ UBX@ P+ L+ E- W++
N+ o? K? w+++$ O(---) M+ V? PS+ !PE
Y+ PGP-(+) t+(--) 5+++ X+ R(*) !tv
b+(+++) DI+ D+(---) G-- e(*) h--- r+++ y+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
(For those who don't know what the above is, check geekcode.com. Sad. Yes. =)
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