#About Lafras

**My story ** - I grew up in a small mining town in the 1970's, my older brother did radio and TV repairs out of the house, so I was always tinkering with the soldering iron, playing with the 'scope, building crystal radio's, oscillators, best of all - shock machines. At about the age of 12 I read a article in an electronics magazine on the Von Neumann architecture, I set out to build a decimal display counter with a 4017, and diodes as a ROM, this was my first computer and stored program. After that I used to go with my brother when he bought TV parts, so I could read the data-sheets of processors such as the 8008 in the shop as the data-books were to expensive to take home. Shortly after that I saw a newspaper advert for a ZX81 computer at a department store in the "big city", I took the money I had saved from my paper route and without telling my parents set out by train on the 100 mile journey, without a clue of where I was going. I got lost that day, but also found my way.

My Chronological Journey  - 1982, Build Decimal display with 4017, and diodes as a ROM, ZX81 (BASIC, Z80 Assembler), ZXSPECTUM, VIC20, Spectra Video, Comodore64, BBC Micro, Built Homebrew Z80 system with oscilloscope for a display, IBM PC (DOS, GW BASIC), University of Pretoria (1 year only), PC Clones (Turbo-Pascal, x86 Intel Macro Assembler), dBase, Clipper, Built Multi tasking PC application using VT100 terminals and co-operatively swapping Turbo Pascal's stack in Assembler, Novell btrieve, 1991 , IBM AS400 (RPG-400), Microchip PIC16C56 (Assembler, c), Borland C++ , Built Remote monitoring and reporting equipment using a PIC and minimalist modem hardware (12 components) and signal processing in the PIC (<$3), 1999, Borland C++ Builder, SQL, HTML , FPGA (VHDL),  Built embedded telecoms using PIC/C/BCB/HTML, PHP(minimal), JavaScript, 2007, Linux (Python, Asterisk Dialplan),  ARM-M3(cortex) embedded processors (GCC), Node.js

Current passion : QualeQuest

I am a solo programmer, I tend to do my own thing, About 20% of my day is spent reading about programming.

I have been a self employed entrepreneur since 1992, but I focus on heavily technical aspects and less on running the business so I have had moderate success but never been able to scale the business aspects (still trying). 

I started QualeQuest, because in 1999 I intuitively created a platform for web development that I used for many years, in 2014 I started to modernise, rewrite and open-source it. I published some pretty cool stuff, but nobody seems to notice it between all the "noise" of new technologies, So I started to try and document the theory behind it, I actually had to discover what I invented and find a way to express it in a theoretical manner that would illustrate the benefits, this has been great and has lead to more abstract thinking and further evolution of the concepts - truly a Quest.






