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 comments, Lukáš and Scott. It seems to load fine for me.
Because I'm deeply invested in the whole JVM end of things, when I need to do something quick and dirty that can rely on Java-based tools, I use Groovy. But for whatever reason, this approach hasn't really caught on in the same way that Python has as a convenient framework for accessing powerful toolchains. Evidence of this is really clear, I think - compare the number of projects willing to write some high-performance toolchain in C so that it can be called from Python, vs the number projects willing to write some high-performance toolchain in Java so that it can be called from Groovy...
Kotlin could help as an alternative way of leveraging Java code base. I guess Scala already has?