Hello, my name is Sven.

I'm a German guy living in Northern Finland. But otherwise I'm fine.

I spend my days as a software engineering mercenary/prostitute/consultant - whichever you prefer, and my nights tinkering with microcontrollers, programming and creating music. I actually have a life besides that, too, but that's not the point here.

About sgreg.fi

The main idea behind this website is for me to have a common place to provide general information about my personal projects and document my tinkering and other activities with programming, electronics and home recording. In a way as portfolio to brag about my doings, but also as information resource and maybe even encouragement for other people to catch up with these subjects.

While (at least at this point) not aiming to provide actual tutorials, my intention is to simply share what I'm doing and how I do things, and in the process of it, meticulously document it. Yes, I will reinvent the wheel along that way. Yes, probably lots of things I do could be achieved in two minutes by googling and copy&pasting some Arduino source code or whatever. If that's your thing, fine, keep on doing so. And go away. If instead you want to actually understand how things work and improve yourself, I salute you. And I hope my writings will be of help to you.

A Short History of Mine

My path to programming began probably somewhere back in the year 2000 through good old IRC and the mIRC client. All the leet kids had their own themes and did some own scripting stuff with it, so, being an impressionable teenager, I naturally wanted to be part of that. Well, it wasn't really going anywhere with that.

Around the same time I learned about Linux and I gave it a try. Fascinating new worlds opening up for me. Here were the leet kids bragging about their shell accounts, and suddenly, all I had to do was open a terminal and I had one for myself. But all mockery aside, seeing the sheer limitless possibilities with Linux and demystifying the concept of the internet through it, I was sold and never went back to anything else. (admittedly, not really knowing about dual boot and messing up the MBR might have played a role here at first, too)

Understanding a command line can be used for more than just navigating through the file system, I learned about bash scripting and was soon looking for more. I got myself books on Perl, C and PHP programming and fumbled around with those languages. After finishing my vocational training in electronics engineering in 2002, I ended up working the late shift assembling and repairing RF amplifiers, discovering the magic of the night to pursue my programming hobby. Striving for more, I soon after decided that this isn't what I want out of life, quit the job and went back to school to eventually enroll in a computer engineering degree program.

Gaining interest in other fields of computer science and struggling which direction to go, I decided to change my major to computer networking and focused my elective courses on more electronics and embedded system subjects, including a year abroad as exchange student in Finland where I fully delved into microcontrollers, FPGAs and DSP. Fascinated by FPGAs, I wrote my final thesis about soft processors and graduated with a diploma in computer science in early 2009.

Freshly graduated, I did some Linux kernel, driver and system development for FPGA based systems until the global financial crisis provided me the opportunity to find something else. So I actually moved back to Finland and at first continued with Linux kernel and system development, but as time passed, little by little I moved to all kinds of directions, always finding something new to learn, improving myself and remain interdisciplinary with it all. But I can't deny that at heart, I'm a low level guy, pushing bits and debug with an oscilloscope, that's the dream. So along the way, I went back to my roots with electronics and spend my free time nowadays - among other things - with microcontroller programming and some PCB designing.

Yet somehow I also ended up hacking together this website.. Oh well.