Welcome To My Website
This is the homepage of Mark Street a Robotics Engineer and Software Developer who hails from Melbourne, Australia. This is where I put my career and business oriented musings, useful links and advertise my services.
Who is a Roboticist?
Roboticist is a term first coined by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 book 'Liar!' where he defined a roboticist as:
"One who conceptualizes, designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots."
My favourite definition of the term 'Roboticist' comes from electronicdesign.com which states:
"A Roboticist is often a jack of all trades. It typically takes electrical and mechanical engineering skills to construct a robot and an advanced programmer to tie the entire system together. Experience with artificial intelligence, computer planning, and real-time embedded systems is invaluable."
I think this is the best description of my engineering skillset that I could find. While job hunting I continually find that I have to categorise myself into the various boxes that a recruitment agent or agency requires for a specific position. However at the same time I know that I am all of those boxes and more.
09 October 2009
Free and Open Source Software
I am a huge proponent of the use and contribution to Open Source Software and of the donation by so many developers of their code, and by extension their time, to allow the creation of a huge amount of useful software.
There are many of places where you can find open source software freely available online including Google Code, Github and Tigris for a great collection of software engineering tools. However the most comprehensive and overall most useful collection can be found on Sourceforge.
I highly recommend that all Software Engineers and I.T. Professionals check Sourceforge as soon as their client asks "What kind of software can I get to do this ... ".
20 October 2009