What I do to earn a living
Primarily I still think of myself as a designer. I design VLSI silicon chips that go into electronic consumer entertainment devices. Things like set-top-boxes for receiving digital TV, or DVD players and recorders.
While I still keep my hand in
as a technical contributor,
I've also worked in management positions, and I like to think
I have an entrepreneurial outlook.
The sort of products I design require a lot of embedded software to function correctly. The hardware design process itself also requires a lot of software modelling. As a result I'm pretty much equally comfortable developing hardware and software. Most of the software I've worked on has been written in C++. Though in the past I've worked in C and various archaic languages like BCPL. I've also written a lot of assembler and microcode for a number of machines.
As a director of a start-up you pretty much end up doing all of the odd jobs that that you haven't hired anyone else to do. I've had to turn my hand to quite a few things, including systems administration. I'm reasonably adept, though by no means an expert, with Solaris and Linux admin, and I can just about get by with Windows.
If you'd like to see a bit more detail then take a look at my thoughts about the companies I've worked for or take a look at my CV (resume).