My life has been cursed with a painful succession of exotic compilers development, some of which I was not allowed to know what they were used for. Since compilers require combining both high level algorithms with low level knowledge of the target architecture, I had to mess with the full range. I contributed to the GNU toolchain (implementing hardware erratas, adding finite state machines to the assembler, fixing relentlessly the debugger) and to the C++ language committee. Since the mid 90s, I've been doing some embedded development and OS development, with a strong security focus in mind. Now I am a co-founder of a firmware security company where we have to apply many of these experiences. I enjoy encouraging and guiding other people to grow and get involved with the free software community, especially in terms of both security and compilers development.