Curriculum vitae

January 2016 - January 2020. Developing a A new programming language called Lisp++ and a new programming language called Java Training Wheels. Java Training Wheels (or J.T.W for short) has been accepted by Richard Stallman as part of the Free Software Foundation's repository of Free software, so it is now known by the longer name GNU Java Training Wheels.

June 2014 - December 2015. Developing a C to Java translator.

26 September 2015. Installed Windows 10 on my laptop.

May 2015. Purchased a $500 Acer Aspire ES1-511 Intel Quad N2930 2.16GHz 4GB 15.6\" 1TB laptop for storing my 655 GB *.flac collection on. This computer introduced me to the Windows 8 operating system, but I later installed a dual boot system for Lubuntu and Windows to exist contemporaneously together. I spent the month copying files from my tower case to my laptop with the end result is that all of my computer's functionality can be accessed via the laptop, which gives the advantage that I can take the laptop anywhere whilst my tower case is restricted to its original location. Laptops also benefit from a battery power supply which means that even if the mains power is cut, the laptop can continue to operate.

20 February 2013 - 6 May 2015. Working twice a week for two hours a day at Molten Media disassembling desktop computers, servers and routers. Also worked for Molten Media as a MyS.Q.L./P.H.P. computer programmer by writing 377 lines of P.H.P. code for querying all invoice items within a certain given date range. Also added some functionality to an approximately 80,000 lines of P.H.P. code free and open source WAMP invoicing system called BambooInvoice. Also added some new install files to an over 25,000 lines of JavaScript code, free and open source automatic installer module called DriverPackSolution.

February - May 2014. Installed Lubuntu GNU/Linux on my home computer. Lubuntu is a cut down version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux which runs happily under 512 MB of RAM. I did this because Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows XP, my other operating system.

11 December 2013 - 4 February 2014. Working as a P.H.P./MyS.Q.L. web coder. Wrote a browser plugin for Wordpress for querying a database of clients. Also wrote code for Creating Reading Updating and Deleting (CRUD) records from the clients database through the Wordpress plugin. This CRUD system works well with arbitrary tables, although some of the table parameters need to be hard coded into the CRUD files: CRUD.php and CRUD-functions.php. This Website (davin.50webs.com) uses static page creation (using the GNU m4 language) but my new knowledge allows me to write dynamic content WYSIWYG Websites suitable for editing by computer programming novices. This was the first project for me that involved using Cascading Style Sheets for all font markup instead of nested tables, font tags and other messy crud. See the following link for more information about the CRUD system.

May 2013 - December 2013. Developing a C to Java translator.

18 June 2012. Turned down a job offer as a software engineer for google.com as a because it would involve me relocating to Sydney, Australia and I am not currently able to relocate out of Christchurch. The person who offered me the job was Andy King (andyking <at> google <dot> com).

1 January 2011 - April 2013. Developed a new programming language called Lisp++ that combines the best of Lisp with the best of C++. Tested the Lisp++ code by writing a game called Arithmetickles that teaches arithmetic to children in a fun way and a computerised version of the game Othello. I am in the process of publishing a book about my new programming language.

26 November 2010 - 16 December 2010. Wrote a Relation Plotter for teaching mathematics to children. The relation plotter generalises an earlier Function Plotter program that I wrote in 2006. Changed my J.T.W. (Java Training Wheels) language to use Emacs’ batch mode rather than m4 for compiling from J.T.W. to Java. Also got the J.T.W. code parser to work for files that have been edited outside of Davin’s version of Emacs and therefore have non-standard indentation. Also removed an Emacs hack and added calls to the UNIX program sed so that error messages point from e.g. Foo.java back to the original J.T.W. file e.g. Foo.jtw. Because of these last two changes it is no longer essential to use Emacs in coding J.T.W., except for the benefits of syntax highlighting and automatic indentation.

6 July 2010 - 25 November 2010. Spent almost five months away from my beloved computer and university study to read books of mostly modern fiction. The books I read were: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, Catch-22 by by Joseph Heller, Selected Stories by my namesake Dan Davin, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Life of Pi by Yan Martel, Xenocide by Orson Scott Card and Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

24 February 2010 - July 2010. Studying my last paper PHIL308 for my second degree, a Graduate Diploma of Science at the University of Canterbury majoring in Computer Science.

20 October 2009 - 3 January 2010. Finished writing my fifth computer game called Tritus II which is a mixture of Tetris, Pac-man and Pong. This game consists of approximately 24,000 lines of C++ code, all written by myself. The last task on my game was updating the code to use smart pointers. The game is the sequel to the 3,000 lines of code game written by myself in 1993 in Blitz BASIC on the Amiga platform.

20 July 2009 - 19 October 2009. Studying MATH335 Computability.

May 2008 - July 2009. Working one day a week for two hours as a volunteer at the St Albans Community Center helping members of the public to use the Internet and MS Office.

2 November 2008 - 11 March 2009. Writing tutorials for my new programming language called J.T.W. (Java Training Wheels) which I intend to teach some time in the future. J.T.W. is more friendly to novices than Java itself and learning J.T.W. before or while learning Java provides a less steep learning curve for learning Java.

March 2008 - 1 November 2008. Studying for a Graduate Diploma of Science.

August 2007 - February 2008. Wrote my sixth computer game called R4: Rocketman which is a retro 90’s space arcade adventure game. My game has been accepted for inclusion in the April edition of NZ NetGuide magazine in the Your Comments section. The game consists of approximately 25,000 lines of C++ code all written by myself.

December 2006 - July 2007. Wrote over 200 questions and answers for a web design course that I intend to teach at Linwood College.

March 2004 - November 2006. Studying for a Graduate Diploma of Science.

March 2003 - March 2004. Worked one day a week as a volunteer for the Catholic Social Services food-bank. The job required me to assemble food parcels and drive their staff car to Merivale to receive bread from Fresh Choice Merivale Supermarket.

March 2001. Particated in the Can Crusade where shoppers at Westfield Riccarton near the exit to Pak N Save where shoppers were encouraged to donate a can of food in exchange for a picture or The Canterbury Crusaders rugby team.

February 2001 - 6 March 2002. Worked one day a month as a volunteer receptionist for the Christchurch City Mission. This job required me to answer phones, accept donations of food and other goods and enforce the City Mission’s policy of not allowing anyone to enter the facility until after 4:30pm when the Mens’ Night Shelter opens. Sometimes the job required me to work alone so there was also an element of responsibility in seeing that the City Mission’s interests were upheld.

1 March 1998 - 17 July 2001. Employed as a part-time tutor for the University of Canterbury Department of Computer Science. In conjunction with others, gave tutorials of approximately 30 students at a time in the COSC121 and COSC122 courses teaching the Java language. Also worked in the area of marking the students’ tutorial work. During my time as a tutor, the University of Canterbury Computer Science Department experienced a record pass rate.

During my three and a half years of employment by the Computer Science Department, I developed a series of tutorials that teach the Java language as supplementary material to the COSC121 course. My tutorials are available for free, complete with full model answers.

1 December 1998 - 20 February 1999. Worked for Toniq as a Delphi programmer. Developed a program to import a database from a legacy system into the Toniq system.

December 1998 - June 2001. Lived at my father’s boarding house in Spreydon. Received a discounted rent in exchange for helping with the day-to-day running of the establishment. Duties included cleaning toilets, bathrooms and kitchens, washing dishes, shifting large appliances, carpentry, plastering, painting and gardening.

November 1998. Worked for Genex Technologies in the area of Internet Commerce. Used an H.T.M.L. extension language called S.M.X., and used JBuilder for working on a Java-based on-line ordering system.

February 1997 - October 1997. Employed as a Research Assistant to Dr. Michel de Champlain of the University of Canterbury. The job involved programming in C/Java and adding functionality to a 6,000 lines of code compiler compiler. Specifically it involved rewriting a C compiler compiler so that it generated as output compilers in the Java language rather than compilers in the C language which was the default. It is also where I first started to learn the Emacs editor and the Emacs Lisp customisation language. I have written an article that explains most of the customisations I have made to Emacs in the over 25 years since that time.

1996. Taught myself to program in the C and C++ languages by studying the machine code generated by a C/C++ compiler. Luckily for me I was using a Commodore Amiga, a machine with a sane Motorola 68000 based instruction set. Doing the same thing on an Intel x86 instruction set based machine would be vastly more difficult.

1995. Studied philosophy at university.

October 1993 - December 1993. In conjunction with Bruce Webster wrote my second computer game, a three player Tetris clone called Tritus in the language of Blitz BASIC on the Amiga platform that sold hundreds of copies worldwide as a shareware game. The game consists of approximately 3000 lines of Blitz BASIC code.

1992-1994. Survived a B.Sc. Honours degree in pure mathematics. For my bursary results, I achieved an aggregate score of 462 out of 500. That makes for a 92% average for each subject. Because of this I managed to achieve direct entry into stage II mathematics so I managed to complete of 4 year B.Sc. degree in 3 years. In the final year of this degree I was employed as a stage 1 mathematics tutor.

1991. Awarded a $1000 National Scholarship from the New Zealand Education Foundation for achieving an overall top 20 placement for their New Zealand wide scholarship exams.