Astronomy!

Starting in January of 2020, I will be joining the Data Management team (specifically the Science Quality and Reliability Engineering team) for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

There's a much longer description at the above Wikipedia link and also at LSST's own site, but the short version is that the mission of LSST is to survey the entire southern night sky about twice a week for ten years. This in turn will provide vast amounts of data that will be used to do wide-ranging research in astronomy. All of that data requires indexing and processing so that scientists can use it. The team I'm joining is applying current software engineering techniques (containers, Jupyter notebooks, continuous integration, and so on) to that problem.

For me, this is an opportunity to return to the academic, non-profit world that's always been my first love. It's also an opportunity to learn a bunch of new things (astronomy, for the most obvious, and scientific research computing more generally, but also some areas of technology that I've never had enough time to explore). Even better, everything my new team does is free software and is developed on GitHub, which means I'll be returning to a job where free software is at the center of the work instead of an optional side project for which there's rarely time.

Dropbox has been a great employer and I wasn't looking to leave, but this was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

I'm going to be staying in the Bay Area and working remotely, which also means that I'm going to get about six hours a week back from the commute, and have an opportunity to wander around the area and find interesting places from which to work, something that I'm looking forward to.

When I went to Dropbox, I thought that would mean a bit more time for Debian, and was sadly completely incorrect. No promises this time, but I have some reasons to hope that I'll at least be able to get back to the levels of involvement I had at Stanford. Even if the new job, since it's scientific computing, is using CentOS....

Posted: 2019-12-11 19:58 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2019-12-12