Hello Plasma Active Community

[Chris Russell]

Hello Plasma Active Community!

I met Carl Symons at LinuxFest Northwest last weekend and got my first 
hands-on demo of Plasma Active. I am very impressed folks.

By way of introduction, I'm Chris and I live on the edge of civilization 
in Puget Sound outside of Seattle, WA USA. I'm a developer (mostly 
C/C++) but am essentially a hardware guy at heart. I started my 
professional career in the late 1980's in the semiconductor industry (a 
major DSP chip manufacturing company) where I did many years of embedded 
systems development before wandering up the stack.

Most recently I was a senior member of the Windows Core Application 
Model team at Microsoft in Redmond, WA where I designed and implemented 
a sophisticated package management system, was part of a small stealth 
team working under cover during Windows 7 on future enhancements to the 
Windows OS (software packaging, deployment, servicing, state separation, 
OS & app-to-app extensibility contracts...), and was intimately involved 
with the engineering effort underpinning Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 
8 release. Specifically, I designed and my team implemented the new 
Windows Runtime (WinRT) API's leveraged by all Windows 8 Metro 
applications to access local storage and am listed as an inventor on an 
as-yes unpublished (but filed) patent that covers loosely-coupled 
synchronization of Metro application data via Microsoft's cloud 
infrastructure.

It's OT but really none of this has anything to do with the job I took 
in 2006 when I joined Microsoft. I left the company several months ago 
and am now busy looking for a much less process-oriented employer who 
will let me write lots of code instead of spending 80% of my time 
attending meetings and filling out reports detailing the code I will 
write/have written in the 20% of my time remaining ;-)

Given time constraints and given that I'm a Linux neophyte, I'm going to 
hang out in the background here and learn the ropes before stepping 
forward to help this project. I am very interested in the goals and hope 
to become active at some point in the future TBD.

Just wanted to say hello, introduce myself, thank Carl for his time at 
LinuxFest Northwest, Aaron for talking to us via Skype at the 
conference, and voice my support for your fantastic work so far.

Regards, Chris Russell