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
Right on, Matthew! "the beauty in the differences indeed"!!!
Matthew, your decision to write about informal Moroccan culture is a great thing, and to publish your writings as Creative Commons, wow! thank you!!
I've read a few similarly-oriented books (though not CC); one fun series about Chile (How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle), and several written from the point of view of a parent or grandparent learning about her/his own country from a child (a particularly good French one comes to mind but the title... poof!).
I think that if we all made some effort to read these kinds of things, we might be a little less distrustful of "the other".