My work has always involved some mixture of open source development and private repositories for one reason or another. There are also some fairly large portions of work away from GitHub, which is why I have always liked some of the aggregation services that can look at a wider view of open code. One big surprise to me was that GitHub cannot see all of my contributions even with the private contributions ticked.
I don’t know if you heard, but there was a pandemic. Quite early on in all that I may have been overly optimistic, and figured it wouldn’t last much longer. I interviewed before it all started and figured why miss out on this new opportunity when it will all be over soon. A lot has happened between then and now, I half wrote several posts I never completed, short version is we were allowed to move, then not, then were again, moved, the program I was hired into was dissolved, new one created, I was suddenly in a leadership position but not for what I really do, did that for quite a while, reinstalled hundreds of systems, petabytes of data, another reorg, now ostensibly closer to doing what I do leading a new group and we are at Easter nearly three years later!
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.