A Community Manager for improved communication and support

Four full months after the launch of our developer program and now that Gdiums can be found in selected outlets in Belgium, France, US, Italy, China and Spain soon, we are excited to announce the nomination of Philippe Vachon as our Community Manager. Phil, an OLPH member and a customer, has shown tremendous interest into the project since his enrollment into the program, continuously providing code, support and insights to the project. As such we believe choosing someone from our own community to represent our customers can only bring benefits to the equation! By providing the tools and (some) access to our company resources and partners we hope to give you the freedom to achieve more with your Gdium and open up communication.

Phil is a software developer based out of Ottawa, Canada. He attended (and continues to attend) classes at Carleton University, towards attaining degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. He lives with his lovely and tolerant fiancée and his cat Odin and his excessive collection of PDP-11s.

Phil's passion for Open Source started at a fairly young age, when he first installed a young Finnish student's "toy operating system" on a spare computer. From that point on he was hooked; one of the first jobs he held was a Linux kernel developer working on wireless drivers. Subsequently, he held several positions at Nortel before leaving to pursue an interest in high performance computing applied to digital signal processing, and to return to school. As well, he has contracted for a variety of organizations, working on developing custom support for embedded devices.

In his spare time, Phil thoroughly enjoys developing support for new hardware devices in Linux -- one of his current projects, for example, is Linux/Cisco, porting Linux to various legacy Cisco routers. As well, he continues to attempt to further the capabilities of Linux on the MIPS platform, having fallen in love with MIPS at a young age because of exposure to SGI hardware. One of his key interests is hardware exploration, learning details about hardware through reverse engineering.

On top of computing, Phil is also an avid photographer and is very passionate about the social aspect of open source.