Alexandre Ratchov
alex@caoua.org
6 rue Mozart
38000 Grenoble, France
43 years old

Summary

Software hacker and audio enthusiast, solving problems in a straightforward way to achieve correctness and robustness through simplicity. Theoretical physicist by education, currently working as research engineer in audio synthesis and high performance computing domains. Developer of lower layers within the audio & MIDI subsystems of the OpenBSD project and founder of the Midish project.

Experience

Founder and Research Engineer at, ARVerb
2021 - Present

Research, design and development of effects and synthesizers at ARVerb. Porting of software from Unix to macOS and Windows.

Research Engineer, Freelance
2010 - Present (11 years)

Research, design and development of a music synthesizer for the "Flûte quelle équation" project, used for public performance since end of 2013. Development of visualization software.

Software Developer, OpenBSD
2008 - Present (13 years)

Writing device drivers to support new PCI and USB audio hardware. Design and development of sndio, a new API for audio and MIDI programming. Design and development the audio daemon handling transparently audio and MIDI over the network and local system services.

Software Engineer, Bull
2005 - 2020 (15 years)

Design and software development in the domain of High Performance Computing and big iron machines: virtual memory manager performance tools, file system optimization, networking using OS-bypass.

Developer, Midish project
2003 - Present (18 years)

Design and development of midish, an open-source environment for MIDI music composition and real-time performance.

PhD, Laboratoire de Physique et Modélisation des Milieux Condensés
2002 - 2005 (3 years)

Research in theoretical physics on quantum decoherence at zero-temperature. On an exactly tractable model, studied the effects of a zero-temperature environment on a small quantum system.

Teaching Assistant, Université Joseph Fourier
2002 - 2005 (3 years)

Practical sessions of C/C++ programming. Conducting exams.

Languages

French
Native or bilingual proficiency
Bulgarian
Native or bilingual proficiency
English
Full professional proficiency

Skills

Education

Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble I)
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Theoretical Physics
2005

Last update Nov. 18, 2021