Looking for Work
I was laid off by Plotly a few weeks ago, so I’m looking for something new. I would prefer to work in education, developer experience, open source, or scientific computing, and I’m open to part-time, full-time, or contracting positions, either in Toronto or remote. There’s more about me at https://third-bit.com/about/; if you’d like to chat, please give me a shout.
Later: a couple of people have asked me what I’d like most to do. My answer has evolved a bit since I wrote this post:
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Build and deliver a workshop on organizational change for people working in open source and open science. I’m really tired of watching everyone roll the same rocks up the same hills year after year; if we don’t change the system, that’s never going to get better.
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I want to say “teach scientists how to build their own software and manage their data”, because that’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done professionally, but what I really want is to do a multi-year study of the impact that this training has. Back when I was a professor, I asked NSERC to fund some Carpentries-style workshops for undergraduates who are spending a summer in a research lab and then ask (a) whether it helped them immediately and (b) whether they were then more likely to go on to graduate school. NSERC said no, but maybe someone else would see the value.
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I miss coding—I realized a while back that nothing I’ve written is still in production use anywhere in the world. I’d be proud and grateful for a chance to help build something related to climate crisis resilience, defending human rights, or making open source development a sustainable career choice.
There are lots of other things I’d enjoy working on, including a tower defense game in which the player is trying to help the travellers on the road instead of kill them, a mod for Stardew Valley that turns it into a cozy murder mystery game, a new kind undergraduate software engineering course, or any of these books.
What I want most of all, though, is to do whatever I do next with a group of people I enjoy hanging out with. I still miss some of my colleagues from the Carpentries, RStudio, and Deep Genomics, and I’m sure I’m going to miss a lot of the folks I worked with at Plotly; if I’ve learned anything in sixty-two years, it’s that in the long run, the “who” matters at least as much as the “what”.
Time for another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.