# 2022-06

Chinese history enthusiast (六四事件、新疆改造中心、法轮功、郝海东、709大抓捕、习近平思想、中国梦). Afghanistan.

LinkedIn blocked my account in China 3 days after uploading Chinese history images in 2021-04

https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship-media/blob/master/Ciro_Santilli_LinkedIn_China_ban.png

I do not represent my employers. Homepage: https://cirosantilli.com If you work on or study something cool (computers, biotech, robotics, natural sciences, etc.), or are a recruiter, add me as a connection even if we haven't met. Email: git clone one of my repos. My connections are and will always be visible only to myself (not shared with other connections). I do not publicly comment or react to topics directly related to my employers on this website, this is just another personal social media. Human rights are more important than profits.

## 1

Interested in computationally intensive workloads and accelerators.
Document a lot of undocumented infrastructure and improve automation.
Work closely with the model users so that they can get their jobs done.
Several improvements to the "boring" stuff that annoys everyone but no one wants/has time to fix: build system, debug mechanisms, ...
Reduced CI test wall run time from 8 hours to 2 hours by more intelligently using the cluster, and automatically removed old artifacts to save space. Tests started to not break every other day as before for some reason.

## 2

Learned a bit of hardware internals, GPGPU applications and Linux kernel on own initiative.
Made the de-facto "new starter page" for the subdepartment out of my own initiative, covering a wide range of technical HOWTO subjects that were previously sparsely/insufficiently documented. Spent countless weekends trying to learn how stuff truly worked for fun/passion, but mostly failed.

Also ended up playing table football with other crazy single colleagues who were also hanging out there after hours, and played for the first time in my life with a VR headset the company had bought to familiarize employees with the technology: an Oculus. The console was wonky, but it made a big impression, especially that Rec Room game in multiplayer.

That was fun. If companies knew how to hire, recognize, and channel such crazy people, they would... win.Learned a bit of hardware internals, GPGPU applications and Linux kernel on own initiative. Made the de-facto "new starter page" for the subdepartment out of my own initiative, covering a wide range of technical HOWTO subjects that were previously sparsely/insufficiently documented. Spent countless weekends trying to learn how stuff truly worked for fun/passion, but mostly failed. Also ended up playing table football with other crazy single colleagues who were also hanging out there after hours, and played for the first time in my life with a VR headset the company had bought to familiarize employees with the technology: an Oculus. The console was wonky, but it made a big impression, especially that Rec Room game in multiplayer. That was fun. If companies knew how to hire, recognize, and channel such crazy people, they would... win.

## 3

Work on an open source, mostly decentralized, video call/chat/conference software, focus on video codec hardware acceleration on Android app.
The people in that company are simply a bunch of open source saints.
This job taught me that anything lower level than the Java API in Android is a Hell, and that FOSDEM is heaven.

My task was to do the video acceleration with the Android C++ API, and it was really undocumented, I'm quite sure big companies doing similar things have had to look into AOSP source code to find out, an older Ciro would have at least tried that, because I lost the fear of source later on. And since I didn't manage to do the task after 3 months, I was fired. Me having to learn C++ and improving the build system a bit contributed to slow me down as well. But hey, debugging a memory leak due to not understanding std::unique_ptr would have taken 10x longer.

But the true major problem were my communication skills, which was not helped by this being a remote position. I should have shouted much louder and much earlier: hey guys, this task is impossible, give me something else!

This job also kickstarted my obsession with learning to do useless things with FFmpeg from the CLI. 

Can you believe that I was motivated to buy my first smartphone ever because I was going to start this job? 2015 was wayyy after average for my social class, I had some embedded-OS Motorola before that I think. It did have a Breakout clone though.

## 4

Develop a Java-based OLAP database engine and surrounding products, primarily for financial applications. Yes, the previous project not working out made me go _that_ low, all the way to finance. Luckily I still couldn't code back then and got fired. Nothing wrong with the company though, I really liked some other employees, I just sucked. Overly strong labor laws are bad for you country BTW, as smaller companies lose the ability to train people on the job, and have to fire before trial periods end. We should tax the rich and redistribute like that instead.

I distinctly remember being in awe of using a GUI debugger for the first time: Netbeans. University should teach that! Or how to Google... I became somewhat obsessed with debuggers after this experience. I also started to hate open plan offices due to noise.

I feel bad for going to their amazing employee ski resort gathering in another town in the country despite having being there for such a short time, but they didn't give me a choice when I brought it up :-) I had never seen so much snow before... shame I wouldn't dare ski because of the knee.

# Director of international communications

github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorshipgithub.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship

Jan 2015 - Present · 7 yrs 6 mos

Centered at https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship I have summarized my studies of modern Chinese history. After having hundreds of productive contacts with different supporters of the Chinese Communist Party (无毛、小粉红) at https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues , including about important topics such as 傻逼、NMSL、这人就是个白人猪, I have achieved a greater understanding of the deep nuances of 5000-year Chinese traditional culture, and started to further appreciate to the ideals of our Eternal Leader Xi Jinping.
