At the time of this writing, I am a PhD student enrolled at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, and I am procrastinating on far more important things.
I do a bit of both of Earth science and planetary science (though the pedantic of us note that Earth science is planetary science), but mostly planetary science of Mars’ surface via remote sensing. My undergraduate and Master’s background is in geology, environemental science, ecology, and GIS.
That is rather a mouthful, so in laymans terms, I really just take data, which is usually satellite imagery, and do stuff with it. This is fun and I enjoy looking at high resolution photos of planetary surfaces. The challenges of remote sensing are really enjoyable for those who enjoy both interactive data exploration and programmable data analysis, like myself.
Lately, though, I’ve been running into some interesting software-related problems in the field of planetary remote sensing. I won’t get into the details, but I have begun to explore potential career options in geospatial software engineering.
Much of the software we (scientists) use have been developed by scientists. These scientists truly have done fantastic work, but they are not software engineers, and there are some downsides to that. UIs are often clunky, packages go unmaintained, or system requirements can be either laughable ancient or cutting edge, among a plethora of other issues.
I’d like to help alleviate some of these ailments. In my time in the sciences, I’ve found that I actually enjoy writing code as much as (sometimes more than…sometimes much more) solving a scientific problem. My goal is to slide into the (rather large) gap between scientists and software engineers and help write software for scientists to use.
This is not exactly profound or unique; there are plenty of brilliant people at various institutions, government agencies, or universities around the world already doing work like this. I would like to join them!
So, this website and blog are very, very small steps towards that goal of mine. I have a variety of software-related projects coming up for my dissertation and I will try to do some writing about them as I chug along!