At Stats, I spent my time both in product development and maintenance roles. As a member of the development team, I contributed to both the population and building registers written in Java using Spring-Boot and SQL Server.

In maintenance, I was involved in two large migration projects moving our AIX servers over to Linux and then migrating them a few years later into the cloud. The hosted applications were complex involving combinations of technologies including Java, PLSQL, SAS and C. I also introduced the maintenance group to CI/CD via Jenkins and then later migrating to the cloud provided equivalents.

The first half of my time at DFO involved a continuous mix of development and operations in which I was involved in JavaEE application programming as well as support and maintenance of the infrastructure we used for these applications. During the latter part of my time there we migrated our infrastructure to another group which in turn allowed me to focus on development and maintenance of our applications. It was in this period my interest and abilities grew in enterprise software development and I had opportunities to work through various stages of the Software Development Life Cycle and be a part of Agile-run projects.

Some projects of note include development of an in-house content management system, a large re-write of an application tracking hydrographic chart creation and maintenance workflows, migrations from Struts to JSF and Spring frameworks and the migration of our middleware and databases to the central platform-hosting organization within the department.

This period of work at DFO provided me with my first non-trivial development project, with me being solely responsible for its development, in re-writing an application which tracked conference attendance and foreign travel by employees. In addition, I helped to maintain various internal and external websites.

My work here involved migrating existing webpages to a new common look-and-feel standard (CLF 3) and maintenance of existing websites.

I created a content management system for documents used by the Science sector. Also contributed to building a web application for co-ordinating registration and attendance to the COP-11 United Nations conference.

I worked as a summer student from high-school and into university starting as a lab technician. As my time there progressed I was moved into a support and then a design role gaining experience in various network protocols (ATM and TDM) as well as writing code for network broadband wireless devices.

Originally hosted in my basement with low cost PCs, the domain hosted some commercial sites and private homepages for friends and family. Today the server is a virtual private server hosted at Linode. The services running include, mail (SMTP and IMAP), WebDAV calendaring (CalDAV/CardDAV), web hosting, domain name resolution and remote shell. All for personal use. Some of the infrastructure software that supports these services include Apache, Spamassassin, Exim, Dovecot and MariaDB.

I’ve learned a lot about network and host security, as well as server administration through running somaradio.ca and other servers located on my private network. This hobby has me regularly writing shell scripts and troubleshooting network-related systems.

After a few years of using Linux, I joined the GNOME project (GNU Network Object Modelling Environment) whose aim was to create a fully free desktop for UNIX. I eventually joined the GNOME Foundation, and contributed to the development of GNOME by writing documentation and the occasional software patch. I also contributed manuals to the GNOME Display Manager Configurator, GnomeICU (an ICQ clone for the GNOME desktop) and various other smaller applications such as games and applets. In addition, I helped out with bug reports and the sorting of bug reports.

I was a member of the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group (O.C.L.U.G) from 1999 to 2004. I also contributed to other Open Source causes such as the Ottawa Linux Symposium, and the Open Source Weekend (Business of Open Source Software).