Luke Jones

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About Me

I'm an engineer. At heart, always an engineer. I'm curious about everything, and will happily dig in to how somehting works. Be it engineering with a lathe, a 60-ton brake-press, and welder, or with a soldering iron and a handful of magical electronic components, or writing a game engine, or contributing to open-source projects.

What I really like to do is write programs. Code opens up a unique world of opportunity to create magic.

I'm also mad about the excellent Rust programming language, and am busy learning it as fast as I can; this isn't the easiest thing to do and requires that you understand computers at a much lower level than many people are accustomed to.

A Short Work History

I spent over a decade working as an engineer specialising in heavy structural fabrication. Welding and fabrication, with a dose of machining. Often I'd be given a spec of some sort, and would have to design and then fabricate the complete structure using both CAD and manual drawing. I bounced between various industries for a few years, even working with one of New Zealands top dirt-track racers to build stockcar and super-stock chassis - I even got 3 seconds of fame being featured in a documentary about the speedway scene here.

I now work at Sphere Identity where I've focused largely on learning encryption and the many complexities behind, along with designing a protocol to be used for sharing encrypted data. Written in Rust of course ;)

Interests

Dedicated Linux user and abuser. I've been using Linux since my teenaged years where I first ran Slackware on an AMD K6/500mhz; it's been a heck of a ride.

Gaming? Not so much these days. Though I am rather enjoying the craft of making games. At a pinch I'll always pull up some classic Doom, or Quake for instant stress relief.

Arcade machines. I ran GarageArcades for a little while as a hobby. This was a small business of sorts where I built custom arcade machines for people. It was a very enjoyable experience to see people amazed at the quality I produced.