David Chisnall

David Chisnall arrived at the Swansea University in 2000, looked at the sun and sea, and decided to stay there. Three years and one degree later, he was no longer under the illusion that the sun was a regular feature, but was persuaded to remain for another degree by the promise of a desk with a view of the sea. During his time as a PhD student, he worked hard at the best known of postgraduate activities: procrastination. This involved writing portions of A Practical Guide to RedHat Linux, Second Edition and regular articles for InformIT and a local tech news startup (which, as these are prone to do, has since gone bust). He is a founding member and core developer of the Étoilé project, which aims to build an open source user environment based for desktop and mobile computing systems.

In spite of his best efforts, he managed to do some research in the areas of out of core pre-fetching algorithms and system simulation, and it wasn't long before his supervisor started reminding him that a thesis was a requirement of a PhD. Knowing that a large task required an even larger distraction, he also agreed to write a book on the workings of Xen. This appeared to work, and he was able to complete his thesis within a fortnight of sending the complete draft to the publisher. He has since re-discovered sleep, and taken up dancing salsa while enjoying the (temporary) lack of deadlines.