Intro thread

[alexbayleaf]

Ooh, starting to get members, awesome!

I thought it might be good to do a quick intro thread. Let's do it like this:

Name: (DW and/or otherwise)
Where are you: (country etc)
What do you grow?
Why are you interested in this project?

Comments

[algeh]

Name: Algeh online, Linnea or L.J. in person

Where are you: Oregon, USA

What do you grow? Nothing right now - I'm a terrible gardener but would really like to improve because I'd like to have more connection with my food and be able to eat fresher produce. I keep taking classes on gardening and reading things about gardening but have minimal luck with not killing actual plants.

Why are you interested in this project? I'm trying to decide if I want to pursue a career in some kind of computer work, and my next logical step is to try programming again and see if I enjoy it now. (I spent my childhood though college years thinking of myself as a programmer but burned out hard in grad school back in '02 and went another direction in life.) I'm not sure if I'm really going to contribute to this project or not, but it seems like a good place to lurk and maybe get my feet wet again.

[alexbayleaf]

Welcome! Another burnout victim here, not grad school but tech industry. I'm hoping working on something sustainable and in a supportive environment will help me recover from that.

[algeh]

Yeah. I'm hoping a combination of being a bit more grown-up now (I started graduate school a few months after turning 21 because I skipped my senior year of high school and have a May birthday) and being in a more supportive and diverse environment can help me re-find the things I used to enjoy about programming. (When meeting with one of my professors to go over my disability accommodations in grad school, he pretty much waved it off with "I'm not so into this 'teaching' thing". That's pretty much when I realized I was never going to be happy there, although I also think I just wasn't interested enough in my chosen subfield, which was HCI, once I got to know it better.)

I enjoyed teaching programming to middle school students (ages roughly 11-14) when I had a job doing that for a year, so I know I can enjoy some parts of it. I think I enjoy teaching others how to do things more than I enjoy doing them myself, which may lead me to drift into documentation (or later, user support) rather than programming, although I'll give it a try.

[pozorvlak]

I spent my childhood though college years thinking of myself as a programmer but burned out hard in grad school back in '02 and went another direction in life.

Bad luck! I moved in the opposite direction - I burned out on maths in grad school, and fell back into the tech industry. Which wasn't really different enough for a swift recovery :-(

[algeh]

Funnily enough, I ended up teaching math after I burned out on computer science. I really enjoyed it, but I think a lot of what I was burned out on was the culture of computer scientists I had to work in rather than the subject, and teaching in a middle or high school is a very different culture than industry-focused CS grad school.