Drifter's biography/(or CV, w/o companies, for security reasons)
First names: Matti
Surname: Särkisilta
Callnames: Matt, Drifter (some finnish friends prefer abbrevation Drifu)
Birthdate: 28th February 1980
Nationality: Finnish
Languages: finnish, english, portuguese, spanish, decent estonian, bit of german and italian, some swedish, weak danish/norwegian and I can read some french.
Education: Yes, I have. ,) Seriously talking I'm a IT Systems pre-engineer equvalent
Occupation: Perl Hacker. In a good sense. If the word hacker disturbs you, I'm polite enough not to point out the obvous difference between hackers, phreakers and crackers.
In case you understood the previous sentence, I'll reveal that my alignment is "grey hat".

Location: Varies, usually I'm around europe, mostly in Portugal/Spain/UK but I travel a lot.
Expertieses:
- Anything that even distinctively is considered a *NIX system...
even VAX goes.
And before you ask, the last version of m$ software that I used was windows 3.1
- Perl: (4,5,6, anything goes)
I'm mostly a Perl programmer, although my experience has been quite
wide and in many jobs & projects I've had to expand this area to
get it done, but in the end I'm still a Perl programmer.
I'm expecting soon to get my first modules to CPAN, although lately
it has seemed like an inpossible task (due to the amount of job that I've got)
My flavour of Perl (or perl, heh) is done with vim, which is ihmo the best
editor, not that that would be of any interest. I'm here to tell about myself,
Not to start a open flamewar with emacs/pico/ed freaks =).
In any case, I twiddled my time with perl and grew to like it, nowadays I develop lotsa stuff with mod_perl since it has a very nice interface through HTML::Mason and it is easily customizable.

- Python:
Nothing big here yet, perhaps in the future I have more time to donate to put my python-hat on and start smashing my brains out debugging...

- C:
I compile almost all of the programs I use by hand, not by using any of those GUI programs like rpm/alien/dpkg...Yeah sure they are nice but I still prefer my way. Nowadays I can come up with some pretty nice pthreads code, although most my programming knowledge on C is based on Solaris systems, the basics are the same.

- C++:
Uhh for some reason I think object-orientated languages are a "bit" awkward (although perl is OOPL too...but in a different way).
C++ is nice for some things but I mainly just check and compile the code of others...Hell If you can't type your code from memory and have to "re-use" components do you really call yourself a programmer? (ohwell flamewar starts again...)
Anyway at this current moment I'm developing a low-level directory system with c++, so I had to put my C hat back on.
As I see it will be ready sometime near christmas (when I will finally have my holidays...,)

- java:
Applets.
Servlets.
Jsp.
But I don't like it.
If you're too lazy to port your code and that awful lack of speed doesn't matter I guess it's ok to use java, but IMHO it doesn't have the advantages of other languages. Decent idea tho but the virtual engine is just too slow.

- Visual Basic 5/6:
Shocked?
Yeah I know, I was young, I needed the cash and I needed to learn a new "language". Afterwards when I look at those times in utter disgust, heck, vb is a drag-and-drop GUI, not a language. Disagree if you want, I'm happy with my opinions and I'm not changing them just if someone says that vb is neatto.

- Delphi:
Almost same goes for delphi, although the language itself has little more then drag-and-drop, but it won't score very high on my scale either.
Ohyeah I can write it pretty well, too.

- PHP/FI (it's called just PHP/4 nowadays)
Very similar to mod_perl, but easier.
Not exactly my taste, since I tend to tune the max performance out of anything that makes noise (cars, computers, hifi, women...you get the point). Still it's more than a decent language for web devel if you need to do it in a rush.

- Tinyfugue
Not exactly a language, but damn, some of the triggers I've seen are very tricky indeed.
I'm a devouted mudder, usually as I hang around batmud, idle or not, nowadays it's a way to keep in touch with some buddies Finland. In some cases ICQ just isn't the same.
I usually have time to visit there only once a year for few weeks and it helps to keep the homesickness away.
(Although I don't know anyone who lives in Finland that really wants to live there...)

Employment history:
Will not be added here. If you are interested, mail me.
There is a reason for it, because I worked with many companies that wanted their data to stay confidential.
If this sounds absurd to you, that's just too bad. I'm pro, and it's my way to do things. Respect and be respected.

Contact:

ICQ:
My phonenumber is only for cute girls... ;)