Kirit Sælensminde BEng (Hons) ACGI

Kirit was born in 1970 CE in Norway, but grew up in London. He moved to Thailand on September 11th, 2001 and has been living there ever since. He is still a Norwegian citizen.

Kirit has been programming computers since 1983 and started his first software company in 1985. As a Software Engineer Kirit specialises in software engineering methodologies, design and development; multi-paradigm software development techniques; teaching and mentoring.

As a founding organiser of BarCamp Bangkok and a founder of the first Thai hackerspace, Bangspace, Kirit is a well known and respected member of the Thai technical community.

As well as being a skilled developer Kirit has built development, IT infrastructure and IT operational teams. He was an early adopter of Object Technology and what has come to be known as Agile development. He has closed software sales deals totalling many millions of pounds and regularly consults on the use of IT to streamline business administration and operations for start-ups and established companies alike.

Kirit writes software in C++, JavaScript, SQL and Erlang/Elixir. He also uses Haskell from time to time and writes about Java, C#, LISP and a large number of other programming languages.

CV

Head of Engineering at BiggestLab Co. Ltd.

• 2020 — present

Responsible for product design, research projects, and security design of company and client products together with delivering several major new technologies.

• Product designed the company's real-time low-latency live Music service. Architected and led the team building the ultra-low latency video and audio streaming backend, able to mix thousands of video and audio streams in real time with latencies below 20ms using CUDA, the Linux low-latency kernel, and the (then new) io_uring and C++ coroutines.
• Product designed, architected, and built the authentication and capability-based authorisation system used by Thailand's largest private publisher of textbooks in Elixir and Erlang.
• Carried out various research projects for educational applications of Thai text-to-speech, AI assisted PDF extraction and the use of embeddings for personalised tuition.
• Built a C++ open-source game engine using Vulkan, together with a set of low level C++ libraries, used to publish some games.

Head of Engineering at HotNow Co. Ltd.

• 2018 — 2020

Responsible for overall system architecture and developing cross-team technologies to improve delivery times and reliability.

• Built a new cross-platform core for HotNow's mobile application based on the Fost libraries. This included a Docker-based development and testing platform allowing teams to deliver their part of the app using their familiar desktop tooling. Workflows were developed in Elm, but the workflow routing was C++. The testing harness was good enough that despite this being the developer's first C++ code, mobile app crashes went from hundreds per month to zero.
• Architected and led delivery of a new automated Kubernetes deployment system that cut deployment times of the microservices into test, staging, and production from days/weeks to minutes.
• Created the authentication and authorisation system used across the entire HotNow business.

Partner at Proteus Technologies Co. Ltd.

• 2010 — 2018

Responsible for managing all of the development teams (around 45 people) working on client projects and mentoring the team leads to help them deliver on-time and on-budget.

• Logistics billing and cash-on-delivery tracking systems for S.E. Asia's largest e-commerce company across all of their areas of operations. More than 10 million billing events per day. Provided internal and external rate calculations together with supplier invoicing.
• Built a caching web proxy for deployment onto set-top boxes in China during the 2014 World Cup.
• Built a monitoring and data collection app for a major UN agency. It comprised a visual programming tool for data analytics able to produce tables and graphs directly integrated into MS Office applications, together with a mobile survey app able to run in-the-field for weeks with no Internet connection.
• Wrote a popular series of articles explaining how the new C++ coroutines features worked.

Guest lecturer at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology

• 2007 — 2009

Taught the third-year Systems Analysis and Design course and a second-year Programming and Design Patterns course at the International School of King Mongkut's Institute of Technology's Faculty of Science in Ladkrabang (KMITL).

CTO at FSL Technologies Ltd.

• 2001 — 2008

Oversaw the complete transformation of business administration systems for clients including established and start-up businesses.

• ERP and CRM for UK's largest outdoor fitness company. All instructor bookings, client fitness tracking and all billing and sales ledgers. Interfaced with the UK banking system to perform collections.
• Built the ball boy/girl training system used by a famous UK lawn tennis club for their major summer tournament.

Other work:

• Managed the development of the FOST.3™ application framework and its new cross-platform Fost 4 framework.
• Released Mahlee™ and sourcesafe2subversion, the Android game Missile intercept and various other projects.

CTO at Felspar Ltd.

• 1998 — 2001

Managed all the developers (35 people) and was responsible for developing the core framework and methodology used.

• Telephone billing system for a telco based in Geneva, Switzerland. About 3 million calls per month. Pulled call data records from the Ericsson AXE10 switch. Performed all billing calculations. Generated and printed bills with individual bill presentation options.
• Telephone billing system for a national UK telco. About 50 million calls per month. Aggregated call data records from several suppliers (including BT). Included the systems for the call centre and bill production.
• Client Money tracking for a major financial institution for their worldwide operations, and a chart-of-accounts system for internal audit.

Director at Motion Graphics Ltd.

• 1992 — 1998

Founded a motion graphics and digital production studio specialising in the use of PCs and other small computer systems to provide advanced computer generated graphics and digital solutions for early web site adopters.

• Created software for digital video effects and video editing.
• Directed videos and created animation for TV advertising and idents (for ITV, MTV, Cartoon Network amongst others).
• Managed all the digital production (including web development) projects.
• Released one of the first Java games on the internet when Java was still in alpha release, which was certainly the first multi-threaded Java internet game.
• Helped set up the first web design company in Thailand (1996).
• Taught object-oriented software and design to independent contractors and companies like Ford, the BBC and GCHQ. Taught C++ to the UK Ministry of Defence.

Publications

• October 1995, Dr Dobb's Journal — File-Streaming Classes in C++
• August 1995, Dr Dobb's Journal — A Pooling Memory Manager for C++
• April 2010, 7th International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations — A simple password-less authentication protocol for web sites

Others

• June 2009, The Journal of Nutrition — Cover photo credit
• October 2017, Pacific++ Conference Designing APIs for performance — YouTube video, intermediate-level C++ talk
• November 2022, Published the game 6nake for Windows, Linux and Android
• February 2024, Published the game Zeta 6 Survivors for Windows and Linux

Education

Imperial College London, University of London

• 1990 — 1993, BEng (Hons) and Associate of the City & Guilds Institute in Software Engineering

Coopers School, Chislehurst, London

• 1987 — 1989, A-Levels in Maths, Further maths, Physics and Chemistry
• 1982 — 1987, Various O-Levels, GCSEs and other certificates