Darren R. Starr

I’m a programmer, a network engineer, a father, a husband, and frankly many other things. Currently, I work for Telenor Inpli AS in Norway and to make it clear before hand, nothing I share on this site is the opinion of my employer, but instead is just my personal ramblings.

Employment, business and contract opportunities

Before you ask, and this has been an issue in the past. I’m not seeking employment or contracts. I’m happy where I am and I intend to be here a while. I don’t moonlight either. If you’re a head hunter who has a great opportunity for me, I’m sorry, I’m simply not interested.

A little about me

Opera Software AS

I was one of the earliest developers of the Opera Web Browser. I was hired by Jon S. von Tetzchner back when he was the entire management for the company and I spent 6 very happy years there. While I was there, I went from being a young hot shot know-it-all to a less young hot shot know-it-all. The people I worked with are among some of the brightest and best programmers out there. It was a great time and during my time there, I made friends I still consider family.

Novio AS

This was a rinky dink Norwegian firm where I joined to just learn about the video industry. While I was there, I managed to develop a lot of video software ranging from codecs to multiplexers. I had a great time and learned a lot about the video post processing industry.

Tandberg AS (now Cisco)

I spent only a short time in Tandberg as I was hired during a phase of chaotic growth. In fact, from the time I was hired until the time I started, my manager who hired me had been promoted twice and when I showed up for work on the first day, people had more or less forgotten that I was even coming and the job I was hired for had be changed 10 times. I must admit, I didn’t do well there as I never clearly understood my role. I simply wasn’t prepared to work at a company more focused on growth than on productivity. That said, I learned a lot there and had the opportunity to work with some truly amazing and brilliant people. I was lucky enough to share an office with video and codec developers while I worked on multiplexers and security. As such, we all learned a lot from each other.

T-Vips AS (now Nevion)

I worked a few years here with one of the most impressive teams of engineers I’ve ever seen. During my time here, I worked a lot on developing multimedia pipeline architectures and did a great deal of work in digital signal processing. As this was an area of technology I was thoroughly lacking knowledge in, I was blessed to be surrounded by people with decades of experience and education in these fields. I loved working together with each of them while becoming more knowledgeable about the mathematics and science of computing I’ve always consider almost mystical.

Global Knowledge AS

I’ve spent the better part of the past 6 years becoming a network engineer. I achieved this by teaching Cisco Networking at varying different levels from CCENT through CCIE in multiple different tracks. During this time, I’ve travelled the world across three or four continents and trained hundreds of people in many different roles. I mean everyone from high school graduates looking to become network engineers through people in charge of running global satellite teleports or tier-1 service provider as well as people across almost all functions of governments.

I can’t begin to say how much I’ve learned while doing this about computer networking and more importantly how network engineers work and do their jobs. If I knew all those years ago what I know now, I would rewrite most all of my networking code that I’ve written over the years. I had absolutely no idea just how IT and operations worked and I was writing software and developing hardware without an actual understanding of how it really fit together in the real world. I learned it was far less important to provide the absolute optimal solution to technical problems. It was far more important to provide a great solution that would fit in with the bigger picture.

Conscia AS

I worked as a developer and network engineer at Conscia AS. This is a great group of people with a great family environment. It was here that I truly learned how the IT consulting business works and while I’ll miss working with the people there, I don’t believe consulting is my future.

Telenor Inpli AS

This is my new home and I am already quite happy here. My job is to create solutions to IT operations that will permit a very small staff of competent network engineers to handle extremely large numbers of customers without people considering self mutilation. In this role, I wear many hats. There are some days I find myself at a customer site helping solve a Quality of Service problem related to video broadcast. But on most days, I sit and write code to make it so that we don’t need to go to customer sites as often. If you look around on my Git, you’ll see there’s a lot of projects and a lot of code for a lot of networking tasks that are all slowly coming together into a system we can use internally to manage our customers. There are also repositories for my former employer which I was maintaining for a while after I left, but I will attempt to hand over to them shortly to avoid any possible conflicts of interest.

I love that I’m working in operations and am not focussed on building products for end users. I get to work in the open and collaborate with lots of people and the result is that I learn a great deal and I also hopefully get to help other people out.