[ 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
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: