Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 3

In Part 2 I discussed the server environment, as well as how I built and launched the first prototype version of the site. I hit some speedbumps along the way and quickly reached the limits of what I could do with a pure client-only 1980s BASIC codebase. In this part, I’ll look at how I moved to a backend API system and how all this is deployed and tested.

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 2

In Part 1, I explored the hardware and development environment. In this article, I’ll cover the server-side components as well as coding and launching the first iteration of the site along with some of the limitations I encountered when programming on such an old system.

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 1

When I was around 8-9 years old, I received a Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer for my birthday. One of my earliest memories I remember is sitting with my Dad, reading the manual to work out the magic commands to load the games from cassette tape. This series of articles covers the technical details and “behind the scenes” processes of building a Spectrum platform/application using modern toolsets.

Apollo Vampire V1200 Review

After months of being on the waiting list, I recently recieved my Apollo Vampire V1200V2 accelerator! Since then, my Amiga has had a new lease of life so I thought I’d write an update covering all the stuff I would have wanted to know while I was waiting for the package to arrive. What follows is a review/retrospective on my first month or so of usage of this card - I’ll cover the ordering experience, hardware, installation, updates and software and wrap up with my thought...

Gig

Just looking through some old videos and found this footage of me going off on one at our gig in February earlier this year, before the pandemic had really hit in the UK.