Wrapping up

I just submitted my application for graduation here at Hopkins, so as my grad_school bit settles over the next couple of months, I must now contemplate what to do next. I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought, except that I will be glad to be out of academics for the rest of eternity. I’ll save an account of my experience here for another post, but it has been generally positive. Anyway, my dance card is far from empty, but while I’m in limbo between real work and finishing school, and deciding where our family will live, I might as well be promiscuous and see what’s out there.

I guess if I had to enumerate my occupational preferences, they would go something like this:

• Unix kernel hacker or driver developer. Between school and the new parental status, time for my ath5k / karma / android hobby has dwindled to a trickle. I hate to see my x86 assembly skills go to waste. Looking at you, Ginormous Linux Company.
• Systems work on problems of huge scale. This has been a recent theme of my studies, and there are some fascinating problems to tackle.
• Systems work on small scales. Embedded work is just a lot more fun than desktops.
• Any cool project with smart coworkers
• Open source
• Usual niceties like close to home, close to child care, health plan, big bag of cash…

Minus points for: UI work, remote object technologies, anything with angle brackets, function names with too many capital letters, centralized version control, marginally reinvented functional languages