Thursday Plenary 1: Invited talk
When
Where
Theme: Research software engineering as a career path
A talk about my career as a software engineer and how I like to see it as a journey through many different territories, landscapes and, of course, languages. Do not expect leadership or big money: I have been, and still I am, only a modest but curious traveler. My journey started more than thirty years ago in the land of AI with a thesis on an “Expert System”, as rules-based AI was called at the time, and continued through remote observing, the birth of the web, telescope control systems, detector controllers, programming standards, virtualization, space applications (L2), MBSE, software quality assurance, and still continues even if the final station is not so far away. Different landscapes under the sky of Astronomical projects: Spectral classification, AI, Electronics, System Engineering, Control Software, Quality Assurance… different organizations and different countries. Also, different languages, some of them long forgotten: from Fortran to Occam, Ksh, Bash, C, C++, Java, Python etc. Not a journey that will make it to any travel guide but maybe it can give hints to other fellow travelers when the moment of picking the next destination arrives. I then also hope this travel experience can be of interest to the people visited by travelers like me in understanding what the spirit of a wandering software engineer is.