Biography

Being this part dedicated to talk about me I'll start with my name, I'm Bernat Ginard Lladó and I'm a Telecommunication Engineer. Born in Majorca I moved to Barcelona to study my Diploma in Telecommunication Engineering specialised in Electronic Systems in the Escola Universitària Politècnica de Vilanova i la Geltrú (today named Escola Politècnica Superior d'Enginyeria de Vilanova i la Geltrú that belongs to the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

Once I finished my Diploma I continued my studies to get a Degree in Telecommunications speciality of Networking at the Escola Politècnica Superior d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicació de Barcelona which also belongs to Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

While at University I discovered an alternative to the pair MS-DOS/Windows called Linux, it started as a hobby but overtime it became the basis of my final studies project for my Degree and later in time an important part of my professional career.

And speaking about my professional career, it started at an ISP in Barcelona (KAOS On-Line) where my professional path into the world of IT and systems engineering. This is where I learned a lot about web servers, proxies and HTTP (the protocol behind the web), I discovered DNS, mail servers, and also SPAM, even a DoS attack (DNS smurf to be exact).

This job overlapped in time with the final studies project of my Degree, and shortly after finishing it, in the summer of year 2000, I made one of the big decisions of my live (together with leaving Majorca to study in Barcelona), leaving Spain and try my luck abroad, so I moved to the United Kingdom. I left my job in Barcelona, packed my stuff and moved to Great Britain.

Once in the UK, despite of being in a new country and not being too comfortable with the language, I found a job quite quickly in a company dedicated to the creation of software for the Internet, its major product at the time was the Zeus Web Server, and the company was Zeus Technology. Zeus was (and still is) based in Cambridge and to my surprise it was more difficult to find a place to live than a job, but well that was when the dotcom bubble and I moved at start of the academic year. My work at Zeus consisted of several tasks, among them, support, performance analysis, software integration and even a professional services project.

When the bubble burst I had to move on and at that time I became part of a the shopping channel Home Shopping Europe (HSE), based in Saint Albans, from the HSE group today only survives the German channel. I started at HSE by the end of 2001, before we went live, to work in the launch of the channel's e-commerce web site. In a little more than a month we managed to customize and adapt the website of our Italian sister channel for the UK: translate, adapt the provision system and redo the checkout, which lacked some important features. After the launch we started a phase of evolution and improvements, both of visual aspects and technical issues, which abruptly ended when the Kirch Group fell, dragging down the UK channel with it.

By the end of 2002 I started what was to be the last stage of my time in the UK, and became part of Quadriga. Quadriga is a company dedicated to hotel in room entertainment and communication systems, these are based on digital interactive television platform. While in Quadriga I worked on several areas, including, support, functional testing, utilization profiling for load testing, IP networks, patches and emergency solution development and a few other things. During my time in Quadriga the company offered me the possibility to move back to Spain, so the year 2004 was the year I came back to Spain, ending a my three year period in England.

Over the time that I was at HSE and Quadriga I also did a master in Cisco networks and computer security by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

After three years and a half my path and Quadriga's split and I became part of FutureSpace to work in a project of mobile phone interactive services for Telefónica Móviles.

After a year more or less, at the begining of 2007 I became part or my current company, Aubay Isalia, also for a project for Telefónica Móviles, but this time it was an engineering project, during this time I did the engineering of several platforms, most notoriously the installation of a single sign on platform for several services from Telefónica.

After this project, and continuing in Aubay Isalia, I became part of a project of training in IP television (IPTV) management applications for Alcatel·Lucent, in which I have been working until late July. For all the time I have been with Aubay Isalia I have also been involved in internal trainings for the company.

Right now I'm waiting for a new project.