Things I Do
These days, the things I do have changed pretty drastically from what they were a couple years back. Since I’m attending BarCampBoston this weekend, I figured I should make a So, here’s a collection of things I know and do:
- Django: I have worked with Django since long before 1.0, using it for many different projects. The longest running project type I have used it for is managing distribution of Mechanical Turk style annotation tasks among a large pool of annotators; At MetaCarta, this was ~10-15 people; at Nokia, it’s more than 140 part-time workers around the world, producing thousands of responses to task judgements each day.
- Data Analysis — At Nokia, I also help do analysis against logs for the Nokia Map Search service, analyzing client trends, usage, and extracting information from search and click logs to help improve the overall quality of Map Search
- Web Development — a bit part of what I do at Nokia, as it has been in every job, is the creation of web UIs to make information more easily accessible. Typically using simple, plain HTML + Javascript interfaces, I work to make it easier for other people to get their job done by presenting information in a more easily accessible form; this can include anything from basic data aggregation to more complex map related display interfaces.
- AWS — At Nokia and outside of Nokia, I have done a fair amount of work around Amazon Web Services, using everything from EC2 to Cloudwatch to SNS to run services at a larger scale than I have before. Using Amazon and other ‘cloud’ services has been a big step forward in my knowledge of software deployment and development.
At Nokia, I work primarily on improving Map Search. This runs the gamut from annotation data and measurement to deployment — if there’s a part of the Nokia Map Search backend that I don’t know at least a little bit about, I probably will soon. At home, I dabble in photography, phone geekery, and various random hacking projects. I’m no longer quite the Open Source GIS guru that I was once — I’m no longer the go-to guy on questions about OpenLayers, for example — but I can now tell you a lot more about AWS than I could in those days 🙂
So, if you meet me at BarCampBoston and get to my blog: now you know. I’m Christopher Schmidt, and I’m a web hacker.