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
Daniel, thank you very much for your kind comments! This article was a group effort, kudos to all the participants. I'm looking forward to using Jitsi more in the future.
Daniel, not sure it's really possible to guarantee that P2P will be best in practice, though the idea seems attractive in principle. For example, I've used some server-based conference applications that really seem to handle keeping audio quality high by "fast-forwarding" the video to keep up. I really like that approach. Equally, I've used a certain well-known P2P application that I consider to be my least preferred because it seems to regularly garble audio at the expense of maintaining video quality.
All I can really tell you is that our experience with Jitsi has been really good so far; as one of the conversation participants mentioned in our test, the conversation seems to develop naturally without people "stepping on" the tail ends or starts of others' comments.