The Third Bit

All right: what kind of job do I want? It’s a fair question, and since I’ve often asked students what they would work on if someone offered to pay their salary for a year, I suppose I should try to answer it myself.

First, I want to stay in downtown Toronto: relocating isn’t an option, and since I don’t drive, getting out to the burbs would be two or three hours every day that I wouldn’t be spending with family or on the job. For the same reason, I’m not willing to look at jobs that require a lot of travel, which rules out most of the evangelist positions that people seem to think I’d be good at.

Second, I want to be part of a team that I enjoy spending time with. I’ve had help with Software Carpentry, but I’ve been the only full-timer on it for the last 11 months, which has been kind of lonely. I enjoyed the lunchtime conversations and brainstorming sessions with the crowd at Nevex, and with the CS lecturers at U of T; I have missed that, and would like to have it again.

Number three on my list is working on something that will make the world a better place for my daughter to grow up in. This doesn’t necessarily mean fundraising to fight global climate change, but it rules out SEO for social marketing ad campaigns.

“Cool technology” is the last thing on my list, but only because the others are more important. At 48, I can feel myself slowing down, but Haskell on GPUs in the cloud to drive touch-screen interfaces for personal robots still lights up my inner geek. I’d jump at things like:

• developer tools for extensible programming languages (JetBrains MPS and Intentional Software’s ghostware being two examples)
• a 21st Century presentation tool that would put creating and maintaining web-based content within reach of the average overworked instructor
• anything in the open notebook science space
• next-generation tools for teaching programming (UUhistle is neat)

but I realize these are more “R” than “D”. If NSERC hadn’t turned down every application I sent them while I was a professor, I’d probably be two years into one of these by now, but “what if” doesn’t pay the bills…

Organizational technologies are interesting too: I’m a bit of a software development process geek, and I’d enjoy helping a development team go from 3 to 13 on the Joel Test (13 instead of 12 because I think that “Do you use a debugger?” ought to be on the list).

So: close to home, good team, personally rewarding and technically sweet—it sounds a lot like most other people’s lists. I’ll compromise where I need to (work remotely, for example, and I’m very flexible on salary for the right job), but I know I’m still asking for a lot. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Employment

Uncategorized

It’s trivial by comparison, but since money hasn’t materialized for another year of full-time work on Software Carpentry, I’m now looking for a job. My CV is up to date, and my interview shoes are polished, so if you know of anything meaningful and interesting in downtown Toronto, please give me a shout.

Employment, Uncategorized

The snow is melting here in Toronto. It was warm enough yesterday for me to ride my bike to work, and to walk my daughter home from daycare.  But other changes are saddening: my sister has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. We won’t know for another few days whether she has two months or six, but we know already that there are seasons she will never see again. I’ll be heading out there soon to do what I can for her, my parents, and her husband and kids. Until then, all I can think to do is hug my daughter, cry a little, and wish the world was not as it is.

Uncategorized

When I was teaching at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late 1990s, a team of archivists was going around recording old-timers so that their tacit knowledge of how you actually do nuclear testing wouldn’t be lost. A few weeks ago, Bruce Schneier pointed at this Slate article about pickpockets disappearing in the US because the mentor-to-apprentice chain had broken down.  I think the same thing almost happened with small memory devices in the 1990s and early 2000s: most people were programming desktop machines with oodles of RAM and CPU that drew power from wall sockets, so they didn’t have to worry about packing data structures to save a few bits.  Now that mobile devices are all the rage, it’s kind of fun to watch 20-somethings rediscover tricks I learned on a PDP-11/03 in 1981.

s/get off my lawn/hey kid let me show you a trick/

Uncategorized

Another entry in the “why didn’t I think of that?” category is Churnalism.com; as David Eaves explains, it compares “news” articles to a database of press releases to tell you who is just recycling corporate or political spin (kind of like various tools for detecting plagiarism in student coursework).  Brilliant.

Uncategorized

Alan Blackwell’s course at Cambridge on the usability of programming languages has as its text a selection of chapters from a 1990 book on the psychology programming.  There’s a ton of great material here: I’d love to see a revival of interest in the topic.

Extensible Programming

http://uoftventurecompetition.wordpress.com/ is aimed at Computer Science students who want to try commercializing an idea this summer—give it a whirl!

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