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
Nice article, Adam, thanks for that.
You mentioned that you gave back a lot to the Apple, Microsoft, Deneba and Intuit devs by contributing carefully documented test results and redesign ideas. I hope you are doing, or are going to do, the same with the packages you use on Antergos; that's a great way to give back to the community.
Good luck!
Jay, thanks a lot for this article! I'm one of "those people" who 1) always run the latest release of the distro and 2) often wipe the disk and do a fresh install. Because of this I generally have a few days after the install where I suddenly remember I need to install package XYZ. Sometimes this goes on for several months (I seem to use the "units" command about twice a year). I've often wished for a nice way to automate my post-install configuration and this looks like it could be a winner.
I'm already thinking about how to get the list of packages from the current system to start building my first playbook...
Looking forward to your next column!