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 writing this Joshua! It's encouraged me to give it a try... so far so good. Last time I used a BSD-based UNIX it was Solaris, in about 2003 or so.
Ray, another point of view on this - here in Canada, we don't have any "local" suppliers of size other than Dell, and Dell Canada is very variable on Linux. But having bought 4 System76 machines over the past few years, I can say they're easy to deal with despite the border. If I were living in Europe I would probably look at Tuxedo by default, since they are located in Germany.