Who is Navaho Gunleg?

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Following the recent post by backbone, I decided to post a short introduction as well.

Background
I am from The Netherlands, Europe — a country most people probably have heard about. Either because of the legendary HackTic-foundation that later started the ISP XS4ALL and otherwise undoubtably because of our liberal stance towards soft-drugs and prostitution.

I have always been drawn to computers and remember tinkering with them ever since my parents bought one, a Commodore 64. At that time, we didn’t have that much money to spend so I was forced to write my own programs and games. This experience basically laid the basis for my profession as a programmer, later in life.

As time passed, other computers came into our house-hold, mainly because of my dad’s job. Things started getting really interesting on the PC. MSDOS, PCDOS, various programming languages such as BASIC and Pascal, applications suchs as DBASE.

In contrast to people who have only experience with graphical user interfaces such as Microsoft’s and Apple’s, because of the experience with the command-line, UNIX-flavoured operating systems don’t scare me.

In the Present
Currently, I am a programmer for a media company. The operating systems I work on are all UNIX-flavours. I can ‘speak’ most relevant (programming) languages available on those machines: C(++), Shell scripting, PHP, Javascript, SQL and HTML to name but a few. I have had the privilege to tinker with J2ME (that’s Java for mobile devices such as phones) as well.

I mainly implement the technology behind web-sites, such as content-management systems and various types of server-to-server communication. Additionally, I write plugins for interactive voice response systems such as Bayonne.

Additionally, I also do system administration on few of those servers so I have grown quite interested in server security as well.

In my spare time, because I’m cheap, I still write my own software. If I’m out of suggestion, my girlfriend sometimes has a request for something. For the last couple of years I love to make everything web-based. This fuelled my interest in web-based user-interfaces and the technology behind it, databases, scripting and secure communications.

Future
Being a coder, my articles will mainly focus on programming. How to, and how not to implement stuff safe and secure. Fact is, programs that rely on end-user input are by definition un-safe.

Knowing the business-side of the chain so to speak, I have come to discover that a lot of companies, simply because of the lack of knowledge, money or time, fail to implement online systems secure enough.

Technology is going faster than most people can keep track of it and this has implications that some people might ignore.