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
Matt, this is a very fine article! So nice to see the long view and the "why" combined in such a thoughtful fashion. Bravo.
Guillaume, thanks for the comment about beets. I had looked at it briefly in the past but skipped over it because it was command line and I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it might not be the best thing for dealing with album art.
I will put beets on my list of things to try for a future article, but I can say right now that I've had only moderate success tagging based on MusicBrainz data (or for that matter CDDB or its successors). Besides minor errors like spelling and capitalization, some of my more obscure rips don't show up at all; and albums in a series often have different takes on the titling; the Album Artist and Composer tags are often missing or partially filled in; and so forth. Finally, I've taken to tagging classical albums with a title that reflects the composer and the work. While I get that it's good to fix errors in MusicBrainz (and other such services) I'm not sure all the things I want to do are going to be considered "fixing" by other consumers of those services. In summary, call me "sceptical".