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
Obviously preferable! But packing the laptop around all day in the field when it's not part of field work... not always fun.
Hey Ben, are you serious? You've never had to write an emergency awk script on your phone?
Sometimes I have to do some emergency surgery on config files or database table contents while travelling, and I find the Termux keyboard handling plus better interactivity with local files than with a somewhat spotty network connection and ConnectBot. When I'm in this spot it's often easier to first convert the database table to .csv, then use awk to transform the database table, then put the transformed data back.