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
A useful article, Dawn, thank you!
I especially appreciate your suggestions as to increasing regular interaction # 6, 7, 11 and 12.
I work mostly remotely from my south-American colleagues, sitting in my home office in Vancouver. Managing time differences is a particular problem and I really like the idea of a regular scheduled meeting in #11.
In our Santiago office, we try to have a regular informal lunch get-together in the board room on Fridays. Key for remote people to join in to this kind of thing is a really solid audio connection accompanying the video chat. There is a marked difference between the conversation quality of varying platforms, especially over long distances that aren't well-connected and with modest room-level AV equipment and ESPECIALLY with group chats. I don't have a specific solution to offer, except to say that Jitsi has seemed pretty good to the limited extent I've tried it. I'm not super impressed with appear.in as it seems to allow quite a few drop-outs; conversely, bluejeans seems to deal with network delays well by delivering the audio clearly with a bit of a "fast-forward" approach to the accompanying video.
For organizations serious about this, one recommendation I can make is that ambient room noise is a conversation killer. People attending really need to mute when listening, avoid banging pencils, cutlery, plates, keyboards... in some cultures it is very customary for all to sit down to tea or coffee at the beginning of a meeting and the resulting clatter of cups and saucers makes it very hard for remote participants to engage.
Another recommendation, similarly about etiquette, is try hard to avoid having multiple conversations going at the same time. AV equipment typically makes the combined result almost unintelligible to remote participants - especially the pity comments coming from the dude who always sits in the far corner. Try to open up space for the remote participants to interject - ask them questions, etc.
Thanks again for the great article!
That's a great idea. Would you expect that in a CV or in a cover letter? Or both?