Alan Doyle

About Me

Alan Doyle

... the boring bit!

Who am I?

My name is Alan Doyle. No, not this Alan Doyle. He can sing, I definitely can’t!

First, and foremost, I’m a father to 2 beautiful daughters. I’m an Irish (Dublin born) Software Developer currently living in Birmingham, England, although I do plan on returning home to my beloved Ireland one day.

I’ve been a Software Developer for over 25 years now, initially working on embedded Telco systems but currently writing cross-platform software to run on AIX, Linux, Open Server and Windows from a single common codebase for the Motor Trade.

My passion always was and always will be coding. I’ve been writing Software since I was 12 years old on the Commodore 64 my parents got me for Christmas, later I moved on to an Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200. However since I switched to PCs I’ve never been happy running Windows, I missed the passion Amiga coders had but now I’ve found that Open-Source software (particularly Linux) feeds that passion.

To whit, I switched permanently to Linux in 2005 to Ubuntu 5.04, I’ve tried dozens of distributions but I’m currently running Pop!_OS, tweaked to my liking, on my desktop PC and Teclast F5. Unfortunately, I do have a Window 11 PC used exclusively to play Steam and GOG games, so I can’t seem to escape Windows just yet.

I manage several local and VPS servers and enjoy working with Proxmox, KVM, LXC and Docker to virtualize/containerize my private workloads.


What do I do?

I write a lot of code daily, some are utilities, others web sites, others yet are scripts in various languages, some are even useful! Some of these will be showcased here and made available on my main, emuShell or GPiBoy Github pages, depending. A lot are usually one-hit wonders for a specific purpose so I’ll only publish those if I think they may be of educational use.

I regularly use many languages on a daily basis…

 C, C++, C#, MFC, ASP.net, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, SQL, MySQL, bash, Powershell... to name a few.

I’m not afraid to try other languages too and have been known to dabble in Python, Perl, Go and Rust.

I’ve written software for various flavours of Linux, as well as AmigaOS 1.x+, AIX 4.3+, SCO 4.2+ and all versions of Windows and DOS.

I also enjoy tinkering with hardware. I build most of my PC’s from hand-picked parts (except for laptops and Mini-PC’s obviously) and prefer systems which are as silent as possible, this means I’m a big fan of Noctua fans (no pun intended). I also have been known to crack out the soldering iron and run up some PCB/board modifications when the need arises, especially on my old Amigas or retro PC’s.