I'm Kiran

I'm a Systems Administrator, Web Developer and all around tech helper.

I can be reached at me@kiranwelle.com or the social links below.

Where I started

When I was 12 years old, my mother taught herself how to build simple websites and Visual Basic applications. When she wasn't using her reference books, I borrowed them and fell in love with HTML.

Programming didn't capture my attention until I found PHP and JavaScript two years later and was able to do more and more with my little websites. I've dabbled in various languages and applications over the years.

I started working as an IT intern after graduating from high school and worked my way up through Help Desk to a Systems Administrator position that allows me to do a little bit of everything; from desktop support to networking and server support to project planning.

Where I am

Systems Administrator, Nitto BioPharma, Inc.

Handling most of the IT operations for a pharmaceutical research and development company.

New Dad

Learning the ins-and-outs of raising two tiny human beings and how to work on little sleep.

Web Developer

Building hobby projects in PHP (often utilizing Laravel). Check out my latest project, Alphonic!

Where I'm going

Family will always be my first focus. With my kids growing up, I will focus on finding opportunities to teach them and encourage their curiosity.

Professionally, I hope to focus more on long-term projects and less on desktop/server support. In the meantime, I'm working towards a PMP certification in the near future.

Skills
  • Back-end Development (PHP, Laravel)
  • Software Design
  • Database Design
  • Technical Writing
  • Windows Server management
  • Windows desktop support
Guiding principles
Education
  • B.S. Computer Science, California State University — San Marcos
  • Certificate, ITIL Foundation, APMG International
Recent writings

Fixing Community Adventures in Birthright

The more I work in various programming projects, the more I see that the majority of issues are resolved with hours of debugging resulting in one- or two-line changes. I have fixed the bug that brought me back to compiling Birthright last month. Around this time last year, I was hard at work documenting how to create and play community1 adventures in Birthright when I noticed a very disheartening issue: picking up the quest item in any community adventure would crash the game to desktop.

Optimizing Our Build Process

Now that we’ve released our first build, I’ve done some thinking about improvements we can make to the build process and the builds themselves to make them more useful to not only me, but also anyone downloading and using them. During my conversation with juanitogan, we touched on binary reproducibility. In theory, compiling source code should be deterministic. This means that the compilation process will produce the same output for the same input; every time.

Releasing Our First Build

The No CD Fix When I briefly looked at removing the CD requirement before my last post, it seemed fairly straight forward until I noticed there was a InstallationType variable that changed a bit of behavior in a few places. I figured this could be a source of issues if the CD were suddenly no longer available. To explain why, let’s cover a bit of video game history. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip to the next section.

Rebuilding Birthright: Organizing the Project

Now that we’ve compiled Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance, it’s time to get everything of consequence into version control so we can manage and update the code effectively. Based on some of the batch files included in the source leak, it seems likely that Synergistic saved changes in ZIP files. While that was potentially a reasonable approach at the time, based on the tools available, it’s definitely not a good idea today.

Rebuilding Birthright: A New Beginning

Somehow, it’s been over a year since we started Rebuilding Birthright. In that time, I’ve almost finished BRUT, the Birthright Resource Utility for viewing, modifying, and extracting files from Birthright’s resource files. I’ve also done enough research to put together the beginnings of a Birthright Modding Reference for creating custom adventures. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bug. The game crashes when picking up the quest item (the item that marks the adventure complete) in custom adventures.

More …

How I've helped