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, Lax (and Beau, and Peyman). For me, Telegram didn't make the short list due to what I read on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
particularly this:
Telegram's security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized the general security model of permanently storing all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default
which is backed up by references.
Your mileage may vary!
Thanks for the comment, Morten.
Do you know more about Line's security quality and open / closed source status? As far as I was able to determine, it's freeware, not open source, which would immediately disqualify it from "choosing an open messenger client" (the topic of this article).
In the Wikipedia article on Line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)
I found this comment (backed up with a reference) which made me wonder about things:
Line suppresses content to conform with government censorship.
[update] as to delta.chat, it looks to be chat-only, correct?