Mark Dastmalchi-Round
I’m a DevOps architect, musician and all-round geek. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.
- West Sussex
- RSS
- GitLab
- GitHub
- Soundcloud
You May Also Enjoy
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum.
George Dryden
Reading my recent computing retrospective, I realised there was a big section missing: the people in my life that made an impact and helped shape my career. Outside my immediate family, one person made an outsized contribution, and I’m fairly certain that without his influence my life would have taken a very different path. The fact that I’m still here in 2026, still writing code and being fortunate enough to have a career in something I love is testament to him. So I’d l...
It’s Only When You Look Back
I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but...
Sloppy Copies
Last month, I wrote an article about my recent experience creating a hobby project in a web framework - Ruby on Rails - that hasn’t been “in fashion” for some time. The blog post gathered some interest and made it to various discussion sites like Hacker News and others. It caused a pretty big spike in traffic and my post got linked from some more places and generated some interesting conversations. I had fun, talked to some new users of my app (a simple, no-strings-attache...
