I recently changed jobs, and decided that this was probably also a good opportunity to revisit cryptography and keys. My SSH and GPG keys were created many years ago, I made a new SSH key recently but can’t remember all the options I used. I know in the time since I made my GPG keys some of the algorithms I used back then have become deprecated, and new SSH key types have been added that are better than what was available.
So…where am I off to next? A tale of “there and back again”, let me tell you a short story. Imagine a young, hopeful Ph.D. student just finishing up his research, thinking about what kind of career he can carve out for himself combining science and developing software. There was a new light source being built, it was originally going to be in Daresbury, UK, not far from where he lived but they moved it down to the south. Still he saw an opening before it was commissioned, and they sent him the kindest rejection letter saying that wasn’t the best fit for me but to look out for a position that will be advertised in the coming months. He never saw that position, and instead followed his dream to America to live in another country for a few years as a postdoc combining experimental and computational methods.
I met Bill Hoffman at Camp KDE in Jamaica while my wife was pregnant with our first child in February 2009, and I interviewed shortly after that before joining Kitware in October 2019 (visas were hard, even back then). I handed in my resignation in early June after over a decade at the company, the image above is the top of the award for ten years of dedication I received at the Christmas party last year. I have achieved a lot, I have learned a lot and I have grown a lot. I have known it was time to seek out my next challenge for a while now…
It is hard to believe that it is 2020 already! It always seemed like such a far off time, one of my favorite movies of all time was ‘Blade Runner’ set in the far off future—November 2019! Many people posted about their last decade in the new year, but I have always tended to think more about decades on my birthdays which are not far off from the decade’s passage. Here we are as I reflect on half my life lived in the twentieth century, and half in the twenty first century. Over a decade, the entirety of the last decade, in upstate New York working for my current employer—a long time! If you are good at maths you may have figured out which birthday I am about to celebrate :-)
I wrote about social media and blogging a while back, and revisited when some of these things came into existence. As we stand on the final embers of Google+, and look at scandal after scandal on Facebook we are reminded how ephemeral these services are. Last year Ben Cotton wrote a nice post on why we can’t replace Facebook with personal websites as a number of people were saying we should. The obvious question next becomes whether this whole social media thing is worth it.
The Avogadro project was founded all the way back in 2006, and I participated as a Google Summer of Code student with KDE in 2007 to bring a molecular editor to Kalzium. The library we were using was libavogadro, this powered Kalzium and the Avogadro application that provided a fuller interface (also using Qt as its base). From the start this was a project founded by a need felt by many of us who got involved in the early days—to have a solid, cross-platform and open source molecular editor. In addition, we wanted to provide a library that exposed these features.
My last post wasn’t the most positive. While it was pretty accurate I think it is worth looking back on the good stuff, and hope for the next year. I had the opportunity to be a part of the opensource.com moderator team in the early years of the program, serving as their “open science expert”, and also received a blue obelisk from Peter Murray-Rust himself for my service to the open chemistry community. These experiences both had enormous influences on me, and in both cases afforded me the opportunity to work with amazing people on things I am passionate about. There are many others who have helped me, inspired me, and encouraged me along the way, but I found these items in a box as I was moving stuff between offices.
On balance, 2018 has been a crap year for the Hanwell clan (British slang for those interested). For me it was bad on a personal and professional level, although on both levels there were some highs and lows. It ended on a real low in both respects too, and like an iceberg most people only see the tip. It reminds me of the proverb “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, nothing in isolation was huge but the combination adds up to what feels like an absolutely awful year (a few were pretty big too). Very much looking forward to it being over, and trying to start afresh with renewed hope next year! Not quite broken, but definitely worse for wear.
A little over eleven years ago my wife and I got on a flight from Manchester airport bound for JFK, and then took an internal flight to get to Pittsburgh, PA. A couple of years later we moved to upstate New York where I took a position with a small company called Kitware. I have been with Kitware for nine years today (the earliest date a H-1B visa holder can take up a position in the year their visa is issued). I have now been with Kitware for nine years, first as an R&D Engineer, and as a Technical Leader for over six years now.
It is hard to believe my wife and I became naturalized US citizens back in February. Today we completed the final step, and went to our local social security administration to get our social security cards updated! We moved to the US back in 2007, and since then held the same card which had an endorsement on it stating “valid for work only with DHS authorization”. Everything else we were able to do on the day we naturalized but this step required a few weeks for everything to get into the system…