Hi, I’m David. When I was a kid, I wanted to to grow up to be an inventor. In many ways I have. I’ve spent 20+ years working with IT, and I’m specifically interested in networking, systems, open-source, and technical documentation. My current role is _Senior Infrastructure Architect at Prophecy Networks in New Zealand.

Why “Funky Penguin”?

My first “real” job, out of high-school, was working the IT helpdesk in a typical pre-2000 organization in South Africa. I enjoyed experimenting with Linux, and cut my teeth by replacing the organization’s Exchange 5.5 mail platform with a 15-site qmail-ldap cluster, with amavis virus-scanning.

One of our suppliers asked me to quote to do the same for their organization. With nothing to loose, and half-expecting to be turned down, I quoted a generous fee, and chose a cheeky company name. The supplier immediately accepted my quote, and the name (Funky Penguin) stuck.

Technical Documentation

During the same “real” job above, I wanted to deploy jabberd, for internal instant messaging within the organization, and as a means to control the sprawl of ad-hoc instant-messaging among staff, using ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger.

To get management approval to deploy, I wrote a logger (with web UI) for jabber conversations (Bandersnatch), and a 75-page user manual (in Docbook XML for a spunky Russian WinXP jabber client, JAJC.

Due to my contributions to phpList, I was approached in 2011 by Packt Publishing, to write a book about using PHPList.