On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 01:25:06AM +0100, David N. Welton wrote: > 1) How long have you been in the software industry? (Doing what kinds > of work?) I've been employed as a software developer for the past three years; I worked for six months (December 1999 - June 2000) at a Louisville, Kentucky web development shop called Internet Tool & Die. It was a Linux-heavy environment, and I was hired for my Linux skills, but the owner was a serious Mac head and of course we did a lot of Windows stuff because that's what clients wanted. My main project there was to migrate a fairly large side from FrontPage/ASP to Apache/PHP. Apparently I did an okay job because last I heard, in December, the client was still with the company and using the same PHP code I wrote, with only minor modifications. :) Since June, 2000 I've been employed at Progeny Linux Systems, Inc., which probably needs little introduction to most Debian developers. I held various and sundry non-programming computer-related jobs (unglamorous stuff like tech support, system setup/config/repair, computer lab flunkie, etc.) in college. I got bitten by the Unix bug in early 1993, upon being exposed to the Internet for the first time, and my personal emphasis as well as most of my jobs have been Unix- or even Linux-centric. > 2) How much of that time has been dedicated to free software? I started using Linux personally in January 1996. At both of my "real" jobs (see above), I've worked exclusively for and with GNU/Linux systems. By "exclusively" I mean I've never needed to have anything other than Debian installed on my workstation. At Internet Tool & Die we did need to make sure that our work rendered properly on IE under Windows, and on Macintoshes as well. I used other people's computers for that. :) > 3) How much management experience do you have, in what kinds of > environments? I've been the project lead at Progeny for the "PGI Project", which led to the recent release of the "pgi" package to Debian. This work started in December and is ongoing. Essentially I triage tasks, help plan timelines, assert how many man-hours I need from other staff, and try to hit them deadlines. I'm sure my co-workers will speak up if they feel scarred by the experience. :) > If you have time/feel like it, you might also comment on the > relationship of the aforementioned "Real World" with free software > projects. Well, in a nutshell, I feel that Free Software is at least as suited for deployment in the Real World as any proprietary software you'd care to mention, if not more so. Sometimes specific applications haven't been written yet and they need to be, but this is just as true for proprietary software. People didn't know how badly they needed a web browser until they saw one. Can you narrow the scope of your question a little bit? I'm not sure what you're after, exactly. :) -- G. Branden Robinson | Somewhere, there is a .sig so funny Debian GNU/Linux | that reading it will cause an branden@debian.org | aneurysm. This is not that .sig. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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