Career

My name is Martin and I was born in Slovakia, where I studied mathematics and some linguistics as well. During my studies I participated in an Error-Correcting Code project (programming the coding-decoding module in C++), which has been my only real programming job so far.

Later on I went volunteering in the Headquarters of the World Esperanto Association in the Netherlands, where I introduced separating the paper waste but hopefully did also some other useful things.

For example, I improved the LaTeX script to display the letter ė (that is e with dot above) properly on the membership cards, for which particularly the Lithuanian female members were infinitely grateful (as this letter happens to occur particularly in Lithuanian female names).

Here I also learned to export data from our membership database and to process them further with awk and sed.

I also managed to hack the algorithm for the redundancy in the five-letter membership code: a (5,4) code which can detect 1 error (or, quite importantly, a transposition).

In London, I ended up in an Accounts department of an optical-discs manufacturing company. Basically we did CD's, DVD's and Blu-Rays, but these could be packed in a plethora of different combinations so there was a lot of convoluted data to analyse.

To facilitate this, I readily learned Visual Basic and SQL, which turned out very useful at making various reports to our Customers' fancy.

I have to say that I was really enjoying all this and realised that programming is my real vocation and I would like to specialise somewhat deeper.

I improved my HTML/CSS skills, started learning PHP (which I needed for this website), JavaScript and Haskell.

I have also enrolled a Java course leading to OCP certification, which I hope to gain some time in May/June 2015.

I hope that with my eagerness to learn new things I can get a job where I will be able to use my skills of programming and data processing.

Personal Life

I like processing data and have taken up a personal project with UK postcodes, which I intend to improve in future (big thanks to Royal Mail for releasing the Code Point Open database).

Until recently I used to sing bass in an a-capella choir.

I speak the international language of Esperanto and use every opportunity to travel to different countries.