Leaving Las iXmatch, and going to school After much soul-searching, I've left my old employer, iXmatch, and I'm now an employee of the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. I'm working as a development manager for the Minnesota Population Center. The Population Center has US Census microdata from 1850 forward (except for 1890, which was mostly lost in a warehouse fire), and international data as well, from all sorts of locations. There's also some aggregate data as well. My job is to work with a team of developers to publish this data, allowing researchers to generate extracts that comprise just the years and variables they're interested in.

There's some neat code in the plumbing of all this - the data files are quite large (although not huge), and they're pretty tightly encoded.

We've got a mishmash of technologies right now, but inside of 6 months it'll mostly be on java and struts. The sites are mostly running on a series of solaris boxes from Sun- we've got both sparc and opteron based machines.

It's such a pleasure to be working with demographic data for the purposes of furthering social sciences research and maybe even informing policy debates, rather than working with it for the purposes of selling people crap they don't need.

It's also cool to be able to bike to work. I had a friend complain about a job that she thought would involve a 90 minute commute. This job might be a 90 minute commute - if I walked to work. So far, I've been taking the bus, which picks me up about 3 blocks from home, and drops me off at the front door of my building at the U.

I had had some misgivings about becoming a state employee, given my somewhat libertarian leanings towards the growth of government, but I think I'm over them now. :-)  ¶ 3:41 PM