Geek Blight

My name is Ricardo García. I was born on December 1982 and currently make my living as a software engineer.

While I started coding long ago, since early 2008 I’ve been developing applications professionally for Unix platforms (mainly in C++, Ada and plain old C) with a strong bias for Linux.

In January 2019 I joined Igalia as part of its Graphics team. Igalia is an employee-owned open source consultancy company doing great work on many areas across the stack. Chances are if you’re running Linux on your desktop or laptop, or you’re viewing this page using a modern web browser, you’re using the produce of our work.

At Igalia, I have been working on improving the Vulkan ecosystem. My work has been centered around VK-GL-CTS, the Vulkan and OpenGL Conformance Test Suite, a set of tests all Vulkan implementations must pass to claim being conformant with a given Vulkan version. As part of that work I have also contributed in minor or very minor capacity to other related projects, like the Vulkan specification itself, the Validation Layers, the Vulkan Loader, Google Amber or Mesa3D.

Briefly, from September 2018 to January 2019 I worked for RTI on their RTI Connext product line (specifically, its Ada binding).

For the previous 10 years, I was a leading and proud member of the Surveillance subsystem team working on SACTA, iTEC and other ATM-related projects for Indra in Gijón.

SACTA is a complete solution for air traffic management and has been deployed in most Spanish air traffic management dependencies. The job of the Surveillance subsystem is to acquire radar, multilateration, ADS-B and and ADS-C station data and perform all the needed radar tracking functions to form system tracks representing aircrafts, which can be displayed to air traffic controllers. This includes trajectory prediction and smoothing, and other interesting things doctors recommend avoiding.

The core of the product was written in Ada and C++, and I saw code in it with timestamps as early as 1984, when I was just 2 years old, which helped to put me in perspective.

Other personal interests of mine are free and open source software in general, Linux in particular, videogames, watching good TV shows and movies, playing golf and fighting crocodiles barehanded. Just kidding, I don’t actually play golf and my favorite reptiles are pythons. A fair amount of my spare time in the last few years has also been invested in raising my two dear children.

You can also follow me on some social networks or take a look at my projects on Github.