Zane Hambly
This computer was made for you and me
Janus. Roman god of doorways, beginnings, transitions and endings.
A drawing of a Janus head, two faces looking opposite ways, made of one line running back and forth across the page. Only the pressure changes. A black cord starts at the figure and runs down the left of every page section to the end.
Kia ora, Nau mai Haere Mai. Hello and welcome to my site. Notes and Now is where you can find out more about what I am currently doing. If you'd like to know more about who I am feel free to scroll on down. Writing is where the long form content on my projects live. The laundry list of what I've done in varying states of completion is in Projects. Or you head on over to Fun to stare at a lava lamp and learn Morse Code.
A pounamu toki, a greenstone adze pendant, dark mottled green with a small chip on its right edge, lashed across the middle with black cord. The cord is the same one that runs down the page.
My pounamu.
Three small sheets on the cord. The first is filled with identical short marks in rank and file, all at one angle. The second has marks fleeing a point of heat, with several cords running in together towards it. The third is a ruled ledger with entries in every column but one.
Who am I
I am a former soldier, former firefighter currently exploring computers and the things I can do with them.
I am an avid lover of what is called "low level programming" where I enjoy speaking to the machine directly. I love studying historical computers and seeing what people made in the past. I like to write programmes in assembly language, I am rather rubbish at general web development and I couldn't Kubernetes my way out of a paper bag (unfortunately). I started posting my work more publicly after a few years of just gathering and reading historical docs and I decided this was what I wanted to do after a brief stint working on a half vibecoded, half me SaaS app. My only real experience beforehand was in Java and Lua scripting making mods for a few games like Minecraft, Europa Universalis 4 and Roblox.
I am happiest reading academic papers and historical documentation and building from that. I've had to put my mediocre German and Russian to work trying to decode Konrad Zuse's manuscripts and reading Nikolay Brusentsov's ternary papers. I enjoy bringing the principles of a publication to life through the programmes I make. I have a current interest in physics and numerical computation and I work in a few Fortran codebases. I've also been reading and working quite a bit below the assembler level, which is designing the chip itself. To be honest sometimes I have no idea what I am doing, but as Grace Hopper said, "a ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for".
The first programme I ever made was a series of Lua scripts where I made a trampoline for an obstacle course in Roblox. I was 9 at the time.
I am an OCaml contributor, LLVM committer, Solo5 contributor, LFortran contributor and a maintainer on z390, the portable mainframe emulator. I've added native atomics across all five OCaml architectures, I've fixed some bugs in the s390x backend that were corrupting the heap, I've also been contributing to LLVM mainly within the x86 backend. For LFortran it's mainly adding support for legacy languages as well as dealing with fixes for GPU offloading. For z390 it's COBOL macros, VSAM and a few other things, z390 contains its own macro language and COBOL compiler.
I am an avid volunteer, I used to be a volunteer firefighter before doing it as a job briefly. I currently volunteer where I can with the Cancer Society mainly as a client driver and a co-ordinator for Daffodil Day.
I am a bit of a cinephile and music lover. My favourite show is The Good Place by Michael Schur.
I am, well, me.
A sheet of streaks running downhill like a current, small birds riding it down, and one green bird flying up against it.
Small things on the cord. Rain on a window. A message tied into the cord itself as knots, in Morse. The arms of Slovenia, Triglav with three peaks, two wavy lines beneath and three stars above. A table of mugs, still steaming. A plane of core memory, ferrite rings on a wire grid with one ring in gold. A doorway in a meadow between two big trees, its arch woven from branches, with gold motes drifting up through it. A motorbike, and the patch from the Grand Tour, the ride round New Zealand my grandparents organised with their club.
Core memory, woven.
Projects
Booth
GPU compiler in C99. CUDA, HIP, Triton in; AMD, NVIDIA, Tensix, CPU out.
Voyager FDS
The computer leaving the solar system. The only emulator.
Takahē
Universal hardware synthesis. Thirteen computing paradigms. SKY130.
Down this section the cord splits into two strands that pull apart and come back together.
A black sheet. On it, in cream, a figure made entirely of bullet points, clipped to the shape of a person.
Me, as seen by my CV.
Contact
Always happy to 'spin a few yarns'.
Where I use LLMs, project by project, is recorded in bits and bobs.
The pencil drawings are my sister's. The other drawings are mine and machine (NOT AI) generated from a series of scripts
The cord ends threaded through a Celtic knot cut from dark oak, a single band that weaves through itself and comes back round.
Celtic knot that I also own.