Introductions

Many of you may be wondering how I came up with the term “buildscientist”.

Truth be told this was a title given to me by a friend and former work colleague. Though in retrospect I can remember being curious about an applications build process from an early age.

My foray into the science of builds started as a late teenager when I attempted to build SSH v1.x by Tectia (formerly known as SSH Communications Security) on a box with the following specs: 

• 486 DX2 66 Mhz
• 32MB RAM
• 500GB Storage
• FreeBSD 3.x 

Back then SSH v1 was free/open source so anyone with an OS and a C compiler could presumably build SSH v1 on their platform. Fortunately for me I had both. Sure I could have used FreeBSD ports to build it for me but where was all the fun in that? In any case I don’t quite remember all the details with the exception of it being a very looooooooooooooooooong build process. Long but fun because I got to tinker around with make files and learn a little about how compilers and linkers work.

Some people get mad when they get/see build errors. Me? I see it as a challenge! >Oooh the build is failing - it’s crumbling - red lights are flashing (thanks Jenkins) - the world is coming to and end muhahaha. 

Well most days I like to take a humorous approach to builds failing . It doesn’t mean I don’t take build failures seriously (no really you should see how I react to a failed build) but some comedy behind the situation tends to lighten the mood.

Oh and given we’re on the topic of comedy …