About: myself and my site

Who?

I'm Alex Feinberg, a (mid-)"twenty something" living in Silicon Valley, aka "The Valley of Heart's Delight", where I'm a full time software engineer. While I am extremely fortunate to do what I love for a living, I'm also interested in history, philosophy and photography.

You can also find me elsewhere:

• github/afeinberg
• twitter/strlen
• On LinkedIn
• flickr
• Email: alex [at sign] strlen.net

Random biographical facts

• I'm an immigrant and a naturalized US citizen
• I'm an alumnus of Monta Vista Highschool (class of 2002), De Anza College and Santa Clara University (BS 2006, MS 2009)
• I've been employed in the computer software/Internet industry since I was fifteen
• My Myers-Brigg personality type is INTJ

What's strlen? Why this site?

Back in 1998 I couldn't choose which domain name to get, so I picked strlen: after the C standard library function for calculating the length of a string.

	NAME
	strlen - calculate the length of a string
	
	SYNOPSIS
	#include 
	
	size_t strlen(const char *s);
	
	DESCRIPTION
	The  strlen()  function  calculates  the  length  of  the string s, not
	including the terminating `\0' character.
	
	RETURN VALUE
	The strlen() function returns the number of characters in s.
	
	CONFORMING TO
	SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89, C99.
	
	SEE ALSO
	string(3), wcslen(3), wcsnlen(3)
      

Initially the site ran on a Pentium 100, over a dial-up connection (albeit with a static ip), from the living room of my parents' apartment in Cupertino. Later on it ran on a whole slew of machines -- from a 40 mhz Sparc 10 to a 2.6 ghz Celeron -- and operating systems (Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD) over a DSL line. Now this machine is collocated at Layer42 (through Applied Operations). It's a Supermicro 1U with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.20 Ghz) running 64-bit Linux.

I built this site largely for my own education and enjoyment. As my interests shifted from systems administration to software engineering (especially after college), the site has moved from flat HTML pages to being dynamically generated.