ZiggyTheHamster's Blog

Hi, I’m Ziggy. I am a Rubyist who has been writing software and tinkering with computers my whole life. I started with BASIC on the Apple ][ computers at school, then got an IBM PCjr at home in 1995 that I wrote a ton of BASIC on. When I got connected to the Internet around 2000 and began going by Ziggy the Hamster around 2001, I was writing stuff for the MSN Chat network in Visual Basic 6 and wrote websites in Perl and eventually PHP.

When one of the first Ruby on Rails betas dropped in 2004, I picked it up and was hooked. I’ve been primarily using Ruby ever since, but also have production applications written in JavaScript, and a few small but mission-critical things written in Crystal. I have experience with a ton of different languages, and don’t find it terribly difficult to pick up new ones.

My educational background is in information security, and am pretty passionate about it, but I find tough technical challenges and leading teams to build excellent products to be more rewarding.

You can read more about me or consider hiring me if you’re interested.

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Projects

Aganakti:
Ruby client for Apache Druid SQL. The name means “doctor” in Cherokee.
AVISynth Scripts:
AVISynth scripts I wrote when I worked at Oklahoma State University to process mostly interlaced poorly cropped and sometimes the wrong aspect ratio source files. They took an eternity to run.
ignitionServer:
My first open source project, an IRCX server for Windows. Written in Visual Basic 6.0 and last updated in 2006. I apologize in advance for anything horrible (code, comments, or commit messages) you find in there. I started this when I was 14 and a completely different (and generally speaking, shitty) person.
Navy DIF for Ruby:
A Data Interchange Format (DIF) parser for Ruby, which I wrote in 2011 to be able to read structured output from a MVS mainframe with queries written in FOCUS 7.1 (otherwise fixed-width or hacked CSV using commas in fixed width fields were the only viable options). This is also the format used by VisiCalc. Live life like it’s 1981 and check out this ancient spreadsheet format.
Sega2PS2 Arduino Sketch:
An Arduino project that converts controllers to a PS/2 keyboard for interfacing to retro computers. Sort of a proof of concept at this point because it was the first Arduino thing I did.
Sega Tera Drive Reverse Engineering:
A Ghidra project that reverse engineers the BIOS and special utilities of the Sega Tera Drive.
TandyMod+ ROM Edition:
A version of Alan Hightower’s TandyMod+ for the IBM PCjr that uses a ROM as a logic table. I sell these on my Tindie shop, if I produce another batch.
User-Agent parser for Ruby:
A gem that parses user agents. A fork of another library of the same name, except kept updated with new knowledge and accepting PRs.
WD76UTIL:
A library, utility, and driver written in C for DOS to control the WD76 family of chipsets, as used in the Sega Tera Drive and Amstrad Mega PC.
Willem EPROM Adapters:
Adapters for the Willem EPROM programmer or compatible. It’s probably cheaper to buy a new EPROM reader, but I think this parallel port reader is still pretty good!