Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for the comment, Marco! and if my humble article helped you along the way, I am just delighted!
Nice article, Scott. One of the things I don't often see mentioned in text editor discussions is the kind of editor that 1) views the screen as a canvas full of blanks, 2) tends to run in replacement mode rather than insert mode and 3) is really only useful with monospace fonts. This was the first kind of text editor I encountered and it was really useful for programming in FORTRAN where columns 1-5, 6 and 7 had real meaning and for editing files of data where fields were fixed width. Having long since moved on from FORTRAN, once in awhile when I have a bunch of data to deal with, I miss this ability, even after 36 years of using vi(m)...