User:Paddy3118

My Favorite Languages
Language	Proficiency
Python	Advanced?
C	Advanced(some time ago)
AWK	Advanced?
Tcl	I get by
Perl	I get by
BASIC	Advanced(some time ago)
VHDL	Yep
Verilog	Yep
Bash	Yep
csh	Yep
Wrote my own	Been there. Done that. Next!
...	...

Hi, I'm Donald McCarthy. I work with Electronic Design Automation tools creating design flows, filling in the gaps with novel tools, and generally helping to design and verify integrated circuits. Your phone might have a processor I worked on, or if you have a nice German car, the engine management chips or the braking controllers might be things I've worked on.

I have used the Python programming language for over a decade, and am a python advocate, working by POLITELY (sorry about the shout), spreading the word in forums such as this, and by answering Python queries in blogs. I maintain my own blog Go Deh!.

Rosetta Code Tasks

Although I do a little cleanup of RC pages, and engage in relevant talk page discussions (Kick-me if I seem impolite), I had a stash of examples written for an un-published, (and un-finished to be truthful), book on Python that might be candidates for tasks.

It turned out that, most of the tasks I have written, I developed with RC in mind, and follow my interests at the time. I maintain a list in my talk page of new pages I have created, and, being vain, like to track their viewings, (but I don't artificially pump their viewing stats; that would be impolite, and pretty pointless).

There is one edit that was not for a new page or a task I did that I like to remember, and that was my changes to the entry on Hexadecimal (that also lead to me adding octal).

What Rosetta Code is to me

• A better repository for those algorithms that interest me.
• A way to improve my technical writing skills. (Something that can be very useful at work).
  • A way to do as I say: I really can't stand papers written for journals and too many Wikipedia maths entries where you are confronted by a sea of symbols, without any attempt to take the interested amateur along with them. We're not dumb, and we have to be pretty interested to end up reading the paper anyway. I think of it not as "dumbing down", more like popularising.
• It's a way to take my mind off a harder problem so that my unconscious can do its magic.

Writing and maintaining tasks

Wow, it certainly teaches you a lot about how easy it is to miss something in the description of a task. I have very regular indication of how easy it is to miss something out when implementing a task from a description, as I watch others completing tasks here, very often someone elses mistakes stops me from blundering into the same thing which may make me look a little better ;-)