I love to write thoroughly tested code, and architect programs in high level languages. In my previous life in the scientific manufacturing industry I was sometimes able to carve out fun projects, but have since come back to academia for a deep dive into engineering within the biological sciences. For my PhD research I write R and Python packages to build probabilistic models of biological processes. For the last 3 years I have been working as a systems administrator for my university`s high performance computing (HPC) cluster for my graduate assistantship salary. Unlike cloud computing providers, I provide thoughtful application level support for dozens of scientific computing packages and support users from every university department. I have trained novice and experienced users, consulted with them on their projects, sometimes gone in to refactor, fix and explain bugs in their code, spent up to a month to find the root cause of performance bottlenecks, and communicated issues upstream. My experiences compiling and patching complex software from using Gentoo everyday significantly enhanced the knowledge and skills I bring to my HPC work. Teaching has been an unexpected joy which started ever since I first helped out at a workshop taught by volunteer instructors from the Carpentries Foundation. I have since become a certified Carpentries instructor and typically instruct 3 Carpentry workshops a year. I wish for all scientific computing programmers to use language vectorization features and make use of productive engineering practices to write elegant and efficient code.
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