Developers & devops: An introduction thread

[emk]

We have lots of people offering excellent technical advice here, but I'm having trouble keeping track of who's proposing what. How would people feel about an "introductions" thread for the more technical members of the forum?

Personally, I'm a software developer with a side in devops. My devops experience has lately all been cloud based, with lots of Docker and a number of SaaS providers. I also work a lot with continuous deployment servers that can turn source code commits into actual running code, with automatic testing but no human intervention. I run one Heroku-based language-learning app (in private beta) that I'm planning to migrate to containers on an EC2 server at some point.

In the short term, I'm happy to help rdearman tweak this site, and to help him figure out what we need to do to meet our scalability and reliability goals. In the long run, if we end up moving off the original forum software, I'd love to have a public GitHub repository with the site's source code so that anybody can propose changes as pull requests, or test out ideas for plugins locally.

There's no obligation to talk about your professional background, of course, but you're welcome to do so!

[rdearman]

I was an aircraft mechanic, who became a unix programmer (Sco & Sun mostly) way back when PERL was new and shiny technology. I wrote programs in C (not that new-fangled C++ stuff), Assembler, PERL, TCL/TK, php, python and a lot of SQL (and PL/SQL). I moved into system administration and IT management. But I'm still a Linux/Unix geek at heart.

Don't get a lot of time for techy stuff now days, and only recently opened a git hub account.

[galaxyrocker]

I have some personal Python stuff I do, though I know the basics of Java, C#, and Javascript (Angular and jQuery), as well as HTML and CSS. I've made a Windows program that searches an online Irish dictionary and returns the entries, as well as audio and similar words (if anyone would like to download the .exe and test it out, PM me). There's still a few issues (mainly threading while it does the scraping and audio downloading), but it's in a GUI form that allows me to not have to open the browser while I'm reading (thus lowering distractions).

I'm currently working on a Django app that will display the conjugation tables, both standard and non-standard, for Irish verbs. Might eventually include an option to test recall and/or pick out only specific tense, but right now I just want it to show the full paradigm, so that's a problem for the future.

[Zireael]

I've been tinkering in Lua for nearly two years (starting from scratch and completely self-taught), a function a day, making an roguelike/RPG. The game's hosted on github and that's how I came across UniLang's repo...

[numerodix]

I'm a software engineer by trade. I've worked mostly on web applications and web services in the last 5 years, chiefly in Python/Django/flask territory. In the early 2000s I used to run a pretty large community site for sports fans that had a static site with lots of content + a very active forum (a bit like HTLAL).

I'd love to have a public GitHub repository with the site's source code so that anybody can propose changes as pull requests, or test out ideas for plugins locally.

This would be pretty awesome! The hacking that people have done in the past around language challenge apps/bots could be more integrated into the forum this way!

[arthaey]

I work as a software engineer — when I'm not taking 2015 off to travel in Mexico .

I've mostly been paid to do full-stack web dev using Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Python, C#, and Java (and GWT, but you cannot pay me enough to do that again), and I've hacked around on my own with other stuff too.

I love the idea of putting our stuff on Github and making it easy for anyone who's so inclined to contribute. For instance, I might be so inclined.

[garyb]

I do Web development, at the moment mostly Python/Django/JavaScript although in the past I've done a lot of PHP and have also done non-Web stuff with Java and C, and longer ago I dabbled in the graphic design and animation side of things. Programming used to be a hobby but now it's become my day job and I don't have much inclination to do it in my spare time, I'm more interested in natural languages

[basica]

I code a bit in my free time, mostly in Python and Objective C though I am also starting to get more involved with swift. In my day to day job I am more in tech support though I am trying to transition into a developer role full time as that is where my passions lie. Most of my drive towards learning how to program has come from setting up websites. When I was a teen I thought it would be very cool to host my own website, and after realising that the customisations I needed to do were either going to be done by me, or by no one (since I could not afford to pay anyone) I slowly bridged from HTML to then learning about maintaining Linux servers, to writing bash scripts for those servers to actually programming apps and writing backend code for websites. Nowadays my coding is still mostly for scripts here and there and the occasional app or website hack. Itching for more though

[tommus]

I am a retired military pilot and scientist. I started programming in 1969 with Fortran, and have used Basic, Pascal, C, C++ and Python, and dabbled in some others including machine language and assembler with a classic Altair 8800. But I have been using Java since it started and do 98% of my programming now with Java. I have done quite a bit of web site development, including some JSP. But these days, I stick mainly with the relative simplicity of WordPress.

[lone wolf]

As a developer my native language is Pascal, followed by the Intel x86 Assembler, because I wanted to understand how computers really work. Originally I studied physics but I thought that IT would give me better chances to travel around and get a job wherever I want. I worked as a developer in Ireland and France (mainly Java and PHP, because they are in high demand; if it was up to me I would use only Python), then as a consultant for enterprise software in Scotland. In one week I'll start a job that will be a bit more devopsy than what I did before: quality management, documentation, and getting developers, consultants, and customers to work together; i.e. herding cats.