So, what about Pam ?

Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, aka Pam, is a french student, specialized in Computer Science..

He has always enjoyed challenges. His very first experience with computers was during grammar school. This was during the Internet revolution and he quickly became fascinated by the fantastic possibilities this new tool offered. At that time only a few people were familiar with computers, but because of his skill and interest in this machine, he was placed in charge of the design of all the websites for his school and its club.

After having passed the French baccalauréat, since it's the best way in France to pursue scientific studies, he decided to enter the Classes Préparatoires. During these two years, he worked on two projects. First, during the year 2003/2004, he studied the reentry of the American Space Shuttle, especially its thermal protection. Since it was impossible to recreate the extreme conditions of the reentry, thanks to the computer, he decided, along with his Polish colleague, to simulate them. Even though he was already used to being part of a team, this was the first time he worked with a foreign student. he really appreciated it because he could compare ways of thinking and working methods from the different countries. They both learned a lot, and not only about the main physic subject, but even more important a close bond was formed between them from that point on.

At that time he was already familiar with programming languages which why they wrote a program together to calculate the elevation of temperature in C++. They quickly encountered problems. For example, because they had neither the time nor the computers to calculate such difficult equations, it was impossible to design the entire, complete shuttle. Working on these computer-related problems really fascinated him and he knew that he would later focus in this field. That's the reason why the year after, he studied the onset of chaos in the Rayleigh-Benard convection; it was a similar challenge since it is difficult to recreate in a laboratory. To improve his knowledge in computer science and compare several methods, he decided to change the programming language (to Java).

During his schooling at the École Centrale Paris, he had the opportunity to attend computer related courses and reinforce his knowledge in mathematics and probabilities. But he also enjoyed the campus' life. He was Unix administrator of the computer association VIA Centrale Réseaux (maintenance of 15 servers, 1200 users). He has developed several scripts shell, PHP, Perl, Python and configured RRD, Nagios, Awstats to really improve the reactivity of the team, especially in case of breakdown or power failures. He has tested antivirus (F-Secure Linux edition) and antispam (Postfix, greylisting, Spamassassin) solutions, to optimize mails management. But his most important task was to design a monitoring policy (running Nagios) for University's network (management of CISCO, 3COM, servers, power protections, air-conditioning, temperature).

While he was president of club AOC5, he organized a trip to visit the CERN in Swiss for students and professors where he could discuss issue of similiar interest with people who had Masters in Science. All of them told him how much their grades had helped them with their professionnal goals. Moreover a lot of them had studied in the USA and were really impressed by the quality of schooling abroad. They encouraged him to go there to study.

Outside the campus, he was involved in the organization of Federez days, a huge event that was created to enable students to share our abilities through conferences and projects. Federez regroups 15 computer associations from French universities. He was also a Climber Competitor, bassist in a rock group and sousaphonist in the École Centrale Paris marching band.

Finally, he has always been interested in private enterprise. Actually, his first computer-related work experience was in April 2001 when Parc Les Naiades, a leisure park located in Ottrott, asked him to design their website. He maintained the site for five years and updated it in 2007.

He was hired as a remote independent contractor for several companies. He has worked for FranceOrient to assist an application development in writing XML-parsers in Ruby and applying XSLT templates to convert a paper-based Kanji dictionary into a XHTML-based CD-Rom. The challenge was to extract japanese symbols from MS Office Documents and to parse them using REXML and Ruby Unicode support.

He was also Consultant for the French Government's Public Tresaury. Duties included reviewing of database schemes and implementation on the production servers and rewriting a software (human GUI to the database) in VB.NET to simply provide statistics (dynamic and stored queries).

But his funniest project was an electronic device designing and deploying for the firm Gymglish. The project was to build from scratch a driver and an electronic circuit to turn on a rotating light gyrophare whenever a product is sold on the firm website. He wrote two different drivers for the firm to test and optimize the lightning (in Perl and in C).

To stay connected with the life outside the campus, he often read news, technical and financial, about firms such as IBM, HP or Oracle.

In year 2006, he has discovered a new toy: Ruby On Rails. After attending the french event ParisOnRails, he was really enthousiast to keep on learning this framework. During a year, he has worked full-time on a new software destinated to simplify management of datas accumulated by medical specialists. Among features: statistics edition and follow-up of patients. He developed and tuned them with doctors. Intuitive interface is provided by JavaScript and AJAX (using RJS and Prototype).

He is graduated from the 3-day, hands-on Rails and Ruby workshop Rails Studio provided by Dave Thomas and Mike Clark with the participation of Chad Fowler. After reading Agile Web Development 2, Ruby Programming and Rails Recipes, he really fancied meeting the Authors and chat with them. They provide a really good teaching. That's why he has already registred for the Advanced Rails Studio and the RailsConf07. Unfortunately he missed the Mountain West Ruby Conference because he didn't find a plane to go to :'(

After all these experiences and challenges, he was really interested in earning a Master in Computer Science. Since he has always been linked with upstream developers of the programs he uses, he has decided to become one of them. A good deal of open source software is developed by students in universities. Being involved in such projects and studying these subjects represents what he really wants to do. And that is the reason he applyed to several american universities.

He is now at Cornell University until May, 2008.

Here is my GPG (DSA) public key fingerprint. You can't request the detailed version on http://pgp.mit.edu or see here Strong Set.

pub   1024D/C6DB30E0 2006-04-13
      Key fingerprint = 69E2 1B1A F794 9C82 68D6  0361 7D2F 47E8 C6DB 30E0
uid                  Pierre-Alexandre Meyer <pam+deb@mouraf.org>
uid                  Pierre-Alexandre Meyer <pam@mouraf.org>
uid                  Pierre-Alexandre Meyer <pam@via.ecp.fr>
sub   2048g/0CF29280 2006-04-13

Here is my geek code. The translation is available here.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d s+:+ a-- C++++ UL++++ P+ L+++ E--- W+++ N+ o-- K w---
O M-- V- PS PE Y PGP++ t+ 5- X++ R* tv-- b DI-- D+++
G e+++ h++ r y*
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------