Biography for Flávio Cruz


Briefly about me

I'm a 23 years old student from Portugal and very enthusiastic about programming languages, compilers, functional and logic languages. I'm known to be an independent person, capable of researching on my own and coming up with nice solutions.

About my study

I'm finishing my Masters in Informatics and Computer Engineering.

Right now, I'm working on my master thesis involving tabled evaluation in Prolog. The prolog system is Yap, one of the most efficient prolog implementations in the world ;-)

I've been a teaching assistant in the last semesters at my university, helping students in programming and computer graphics.

My interests

Design and implementation of programming languages, operating systems, parallel and distributed programming, artificial intelligence, and systems programming. Anything challenging really :-)

My non-Smalltalk experiences so far

I have a broad knowledge about computer science and engineering. I'm very proficient in object oriented languages, Common Lisp, Prolog and web technologies.

I have some knowledge about virtual machines and their inner workings, but I intend to better understand them along the way.

I have participated in Google Summer of Code in 2008 and I have designed a file system library written in Common Lisp, for rapid prototyping of file systems ( http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc/2008.html )

I have also done some research work in bioinformatics, where I designed an elegant system to annotate DNA and protein sequences.

My Smalltalk experiences so far

I don't have much experience in Smalltalk. I've taken a course about programming paradigms where we talked about it, but that's it. Suffice to say, it looked like an interesting language, where the concepts about OOP really amazed me.

Why am I interested in Smalltalk?

I like the elegance and simplicity of Smalltalk, as it reminds me of Lisp. I'm also hoping to learn more about systems programming and compilers along the away. This is probably why ESUG got my attention in the first place.

Ah, and it was designed by a personality that I admire, Alan Kay ;-)

Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?

Probably yes, it depends in how the project works out ;-)




Updated: 30.3.2010