Name: Orlando Vazquez
Reason for being: just another Perl hacker
Quote to live by: Safety third!

We’ve had plenty of new faces join the Gossamer ranks in the past year, so we thought it was high time to do another one of our employee profiles!

Early speculation that Orlando was taller than yours truly turned out to be nothing but slander on the part of the office’s usual gossipers (*coughTarrincough*), but either way, there are now at least two gangly dudes in the office who love heavy metal.

Orlando at work

Orlando caught wind of us through a friend he home-brews beer with…who just happened to formerly code for us. Small world indeed!

Having previously worked on enterprise-level social-networking applications, Orlando was keen to broaden his experience in the Perl coding field and signed aboard the USS Gossamer Threads with great enthusiasm. Orlando was summarily tossed into the whirling maelstrom of GT custom work upon his arrival, and proved to be remarkably adept at navigating the churning waters of client requests, bug fixes and custom coding.

…Laying the tortured nautical metaphor to rest, Orlando has primarily lent his expertise to site re-skinning and template migration.

Orlando at play

Like any self-respecting Perl hacker, Orlando doesn’t take his coding hat off when he checks out of the office, and works on open source development in his spare time. Recently, he’s been working on a distributed rendering framework as well as a blogging application.

Turning to more malty matters, Orlando’s part of a group of dedicated home-brewers: people who aren’t just crafting beer to suit their connoisseurs’ palettes, but are saving valuable pub dollars in this wintry economic climate. Currently, Orlando and his friends have a batch of peach wheat beer in the primary stages, and have been enjoying an imperial pale ale that was recently finished and determined to be the hoppiest brew they’ve produced yet.

Bracing and spicy Christmas Ale!

Orlando loves him some metal, and cites the Egypt-obsessed death metal band Nile as his favourite. While he won’t be going to the Slayer/Megadeth show coming to town in a week’s time (although I will!), he did recently check out and enjoy a show by the legendary Cannibal Corpse. That being said, his pick for record of the year (thus far) is the decidedly un-metal “Lambs Anger” by avant-garde French house producer Mr. Oizo. Go figger.

Nile: Keeping death metal technical and brutal.

Casual water cooler jibber-jabber revealed that Orlando has been juggling for about four years. While he isn’t turning down offers from Cirque du Soleil just yet, he’s become quite adept at juggling balls but has also been known to try his hand at clubs and club passing.

We eagerly await a performance of his rumoured “juggling five ergonomic keyboards lit on fire while compiling code” act at the next GT Christmas party.

Not pictured: Orlando.