Monday, April 26, 2010

End of the backup

Does not seem like much to be backed up. That being said, the original blog was intended to used for notes on various topics that didn't fit anywhere else. Still it seems lean.

When I look at the hard drive and see all the piles of doc files with random thoughts and ideas it makes me feel better. Its not like the past couple of years have been empty. Quite the reverse. Just depends what I use to try to quantify it.

There is a certain degree of melancholy in the air at the moment. Just to set the scene, I have decided to leave my current job.  This is a big deal for quite a few reasons. I feel a sense of ownership of the job because I basically created it.  The job has evolved from some casual development work, through to being the technical backbone for H&HS on the Coffs Campus.  I do everything from front line tech support for all the H&HS staff, through managing the research labs, through developing all the infrastructure and software for the science units in the Psychology program, through managing all the H&HS assets ( both at Coffs and Port Macquarie. Also formally at the National Marine Science Center but that is ending) through to supporting various research programs and researchers, through to desiging and building Enterprise systems.  

At last count I was supporting about 27 full time staff, a dozen or so part timers, between 20 and 45 honors students, up to 12 phd students and random other bodies as required.

I manage 5 specialist research labs for Psychology and 2 prac labs for Nursing. (Only the IT for the Nursing Labs)

I manage 3 seperate work websites. Not counting various research function pages that have been set up for specific programs.

I wrote and maintain a codebase of about half a million lines of code across a few platforms, in multiple languages and using a slew of frameworks. (C, C++, Perl, Python, Lua, VB.Net, EBasic, Matlab, HTML, PHP, Maxscript, VBA, LabView, Office Macros etc etc etc) I think I am at or near a terrabyte of media files I have generated for various projects. Images, animations, movies, audio tracks, sound files etc. I could not count the number of spreadsheets I have built to process different data sets or the graphs and visualisations I have generated. (Well I probably could but is seems like more...)

The current todo list has about a dozen development projects on it. Two are enterprise, two are static websites, one is a dynamic app, the rest are either stand alone apps or modifications of existing stand alone apps. There is a codebase comming that has over a million lines of objective-c in a codewarrior project for Mac OS9.x which needs to be ported to (at least OSX10.5 if possible)     

So if anyone is hiring a research engineer with a broad and varied background... call me.

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