"Tranquility base here, the Robin has landed..."

Since a number of folks have expressed interest and concern I thought I would give a quick update on my working situation. This week I've started a full-time consulting job with a small software group at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. If you attended PyCon a couple years ago then you may have seen their talk about IntúaCare and IntúaDesign. That is the project that I'll be working with. I'll be working with wxPython a lot, and probably also working on wxWidgets and wxPython to some extent as well, although not as much as I did with OSAF.

I'm excited to be working on this project. Not just because of wxPython, but also because I have previous experience with the subject matter. My first major job out of college was working on software products that had a lot of the same goals as the IntúaSolutions products: essentially to be a highly dynamic and flexible solution for collecting and reporting medical patient care data in hospitals. The key here is the "highly dynamic and flexible" part, the intent is to have a set of domain-specific tools where unskilled (a.k.a non-programmers) but knowledgeable people can easily tailor the application to the needs of each hospital, or even each department within the hospital. My former experience with this was back in the dark days of DOS so the products had only a textual user interface, but I think we managed to accomplish a lot with it and it was a very successful product line, and at least as of a few years ago it was still going strong, although they've modernized a bunch of things since I worked there.

Obviously a few things have changed in the computer world since then. I discovered Python a year or so after I left that job and I've always wondered what it would have been like if we had used Python as the internal macro/calculation/filtering/query language instead of our home-grown RDL (for anyone outside of the marketing group and the customers that acronym stands for Robin Dunn's Language, otherwise it is Rule Definition Language.) Since that time we've also gone through the rise of the graphical user interface, the explosion of the World Wide Web, and my current notebook computer has 7.5 times the number of pixels on screen and 8 times more RAM than the hard drive space in the brand new top of the line desktop computer I had when we started that project! It should be fun to be able to apply modern technology and my new skills to similar features and issues that I dealt with 14-18 years ago.

I've linked to this video as a way to let you know how big of an effort this job search seemed to be at times, and also how good it felt when it was finally complete.

:-)