User:Silas
My background is rather diverse.
I went to Caltech for Applied physics, and have a great deal of Mechanical Engineering experience (and SolidWorks experience).
I have been using Debian GNU/Linux since "Slink" was the stable version (1999-ish), and I have been administrating Linux networks since 2004 (fileservers, email, DNS, DHCP, IDS, IPTables, backups, LDAP+Kerberos).
I have experience administering both Git and Subversion repositories, complete with customized hook scripts tailored to the needs of the development team. These days I definitely favor Git over Subversion though for new projects.
Most of my programming experience is backend, primarily in scientific data analysis & monitoring / automation. I prefer python as a language, but I am not a zealot. I find it is most pragmatic to use the right tool for the right job. I am also very proficient with C/C++ & BASH. Additionally I have experience writing code for clusters using PThreads & OpenMPI. I have a bit of experience implementing TCP servers and clients for custom network applications as well.
My HTML / CSS experience is rather rudimentary. The web stuff I have done has mostly been webapps for internal business processes (Manufacturing, Quality Control, Data Integration, ect). I have done a lot with AJAX as well, though I prefer to use JSON rather than XML unless I really need the power of XML (for example: Defining Document Types, and Validating Documents).
I have used Django on quite a few projects, and I love it! It is really easy to setup. It follows the MVC paradigm so there is great separation between program logic and the interface which makes Django projects very maintainable. The built in admin interface saves a lot of time and leaves my clients with a very easy way to update the content of their site without needing to consult me. Also, I get to write my code in python instead of php!!! This is huge because time spent doing web work is not wasted gaining experience on a language that is a one trick pony!!! I can use any of the extensive python libraries in my Django projects, which greatly reduces the amount of code that I need to write. Django apps can be fairly modular (especially if attention is payed to build them that way) which makes them highly reusable in other projects. Think lego bricks... If I ever hit bottle necks in the performance of python, it is trivial to write python wrappers for optimized C/C++ code (or any other language for that matter), thus allowing the C/C++ code to be used directly from inside Django.
I currently do consulting work in the following areas: Mechanical Engineering Software Engineering Automation & Monitoring Systems Fullstack Web Applications Permaculture Design (Uncertified)
Silas_Bennett-StackOverflow_CV_2016.pdf
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