Who is Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson?

[ Bjarni R. Einarsson / blog ]

[ Last updated in February, 2019. A more formal take: my resume. ]
[ Sections: education, work, projects or contact info. ]

Who am I?

My name is Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson. I was born in Hafnarfjörður (one of Reykjavík's neighboring towns) on April 30th, 1976 and am half Icelandic and half American. As a result, I'm bilingual (Icelandic and American English) and have dual citizenship. My family moved around alot while I was young, so I've lived in quite a few different parts of the U.S.A., but don't remember any of them very clearly. These days I mainly consider myself an Icelander.

I am married to Emilia Telese and we have a daughter whose name I choose not to share with the Internet... yet. I love being a dad!

I've been a computer enthusiast since about the age of ten, mostly programming oriented, although I've also done my share of tech support, systems administration and internetworking. To begin with I just wanted to write computer games (and did), but since I discovered the Internet and Linux they have been the focus of my efforts, both professionally and on my own time.

I have a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Iceland and am proud to say that I also spent two rewarding years in the math department, although I didn't complete a degree. Maybe I will some day.

I've been an active member of the Open Source / Free Software communities, contributing my own code, doing translation work for the KDE project and have contributed (admittedly minor) bug-fixes both to the Linux kernel and KDE. Here in Iceland I was also active for a couple of years in Netverjar, an internet consumer interest group. I have on occasion given talks about Open Source and my work in Iceland and at conferences in Europe. I am also a founding member of the Icelandic Pirate Party.

Non-computer related hobbies have included reading copious amounts of science fiction, studying martial arts (Karate and more recently Aikido), skiing, juggling, bicycling, swimming and listening to music, preferably at live concerts or festivals. I also like to drink nice drinks with my friends.

I am a proud SJW feminist snowflake. I don't use Facebook. I don't smoke and only reluctantly own a car. I prefer my bicycle.

If I wasn't a computer professional I'd probably want to be a carpenter.

Education & awards

1992 - 1995: Menntaskólinn við Hamrahlíð, physics line. Graduated with honours.
1994: I competed on Iceland's behalf in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong. I didn't do very well, but at least I took part!
1996 - 2000: University of Iceland, I studied mathematics and computer science. Graduated with a B.Sc. in computer science in October 2000.

2009: Awarded the FSFI Freedoms Award at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference.
2010: Awarded the Nordic Free Software Award at FSCONS (FSF Europe article).

Work history

1993 - 1995: Summer jobs at the Icelandic National Energy Institute, programming and maintaining in-house accounting programs in C.
1996 - 1998: Linux systems and network administrator for Margmiðlun Internet (one of Iceland's first and subsequently largest ISPs).
1998 - 2001: Developer for Tern Systems. I worked on porting a communications system for air-traffic controllers from the pSOS+ real-time operating system to Linux.
2001 - 2006: Lead developer and senior administrator for FRISK Software International's F-Prot AVES anti-spam and anti-virus filtering service. The AVES system is partially based on my Anomy Sanitizer program. I still consult and do odd jobs for FRISK.
2006 - 2009: Site Reliability Engineer for Google in the Dublin office. The first team I worked with in SRE was in charge of management of the search engine and front-end load-balancers, the second was in charge of managing internal Bigtable databases and advising internal teams on how to organize their data.
2009 - 2010: Unemployed, traveling around S-America. The story is on the slog blog.
2010 - now: Very busy founding and building The Beanstalks Project, PageKite and Mailpile.

Side-projects

I have since '95 or so maintained a personal home-page. I have always written all the necessary back-end scripts and programs myself.
Since '96 or '97 or so, I ran a mailing-list named "Partalistinn", which for a few years was Iceland's most active venue for buying or selling used computer equipment.
In 1999 (?) I helped the Icelandic Society for Information Processing organize it's first Linux conference.
In 1999 I maintained and sold (at cost) a Linux distribution derived from RedHat Linux 6.0, updated and slightly customized for Icelandic users. I sold over 200 CDs before I had to stop because I moved to France for eight months.
In 2000 I created a free mailing-list service on molar.is. It has since stopped accepting new lists due to a lack of time to properly maintain and enhance the system.
In 2001 I gave a talk about Open Source in education at a Linux conference organized by the Icelandic Society for Information Processing.
In 2001 I created an online RSS spidering and aggregation service, focusing on Icelandic news sites and weblogs. I haven't had time to properly maintain this service either. The source code for the aggregation tool is available on my code page.
In 2002 I created a free SMS-reminder service for people taking medication regularly, primarily targeted towards women on the contraceptive pill. It currently has over 2000 subscribers and is still growing.
In 2004 I coded the back-end programs for the Brúðarbandið (an Icelandic band my ex-wife is a member of) web site and helped them with various technical tasks.
In 2004 I gave a talk about Open Source and software development for the Icelandic Society for Information Processing
In 2005 I was assistant at a few workshops teaching basic unarmed stage-fighting techniques.
In 2005, on the 30th anniversary of the "women's strike" in Iceland, I handled the technical side of setting up a web site to help young men thank their mothers for their efforts in the struggle for equal rights.
In 2009 and 2010 my ex and I wrote the slog blog, a bilingual (English and Polish) blog about our trip around S-America. It was partially written using WhereBlogger, my Android app for recording and annotating GPS points.
Since 2013, I have written code and participated in various activities for the Icelandic Pirate Party. I was on the ballot and actively helped campaign in our first parliamentary elections (2013), but have since then chosen to stay more behind the scenes.

See also my old code page or GitHub profile for some of the programs I've written and released to the world.

Since 2010, I have given quite a few talks and hosted hackathons and workshops at various events around Europe. These days I consider myself a moderately experienced, confident public speaker.

Computer skills

These days most of my work has to do with e-mail, infosec, spam and/or the web.
I am an experienced, if a bit old-school, systems administrator. I emphasize monitoring, backups and automation (IMO, the core of "DevOps").
These are the tools I use day-to-day:
- Python
- C
- HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Linux
- OpenPGP
- Shell scripting, common *nix/GNU utilities
- TCP/IP networking, firewalls, protocols, RFCs, TLS, ssh, ...
- Apache, old-school CGI programming
- Basic SQL
- I understand (but do not advocate) Blockchain!
Skills I use less or not at all:
- Perl
- Java
- Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, Procmail, ...
- x86 assembly language
- C++
- Turbo/Borland Pascal (my first programming language!)
- ~~Cisco IOS basics~~
- ~~MS-DOS~~
I also know how to use a screwdriver.

Contact info

Online:

https://bre.klaki.net/

@HerraBRE

@HerraBRE@mastodon.xyz

BjarniRunar