Happy Cycling

Heads up: This blog post is long and rambling at times. I am mostly writing this for myself; others may find its content of limited use. This will be your only warning.

If you asked me five years ago in Lincoln, Nebraska what I would be doing in five years, I would not have been able to give you a good answer beyond either postdoc or R developer. At that time, I was learning Docker and continuous integration for reproducible research. In the life of an academic, five years might as well be a century. Technologies change, grant cycles end, and new projects are always on the horizon. Unless you are a professor or grad students, few will stay in the same place for five years. This blog post will not necessarily answer the question of where will I be in 2027, but it will help me understand my journey for professional development in those five years.

1000 Days

On 2022-12-11¹, I will have been with The Carpentries for 1000 days, which is one quarter shy of three years. Aside from my Ph.D. work (and yes, graduate work is work), this is the longest I have ever stayed in any one job—ever (which says more about the academic system than about me). Before coming to work for a global non-profit, I was working as a postdoc researcher in the Department of Plant Pathology at University Nebraska-Lincoln and then as a postdoc researcher/ Research Software Engineer (RSE) at the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. In both of these positions, I was strictly a temporary employee and was paid (roughly) $50,000 per year².

When I joined The Carpentries, I was offered $100,000 per year on an 18 month contract to help redesign the lesson infrastructure ³. And after 18 months from the initial start date, I had a working prototype of the lesson infrastructure that would eventually become known as The Carpentries Workbench. And now, just over a year later, we are preparing to enter the Beta Phase of The Carpentries Workbench, which will give us a sense of how well the workbench actually works in a broader, and less controlled context than The Alpha Testing. Once the Beta Phase is complete in Q1 of 2023, we will start off Q2 by converting all of the lessons to use The Workbench, and my work, after three years will be complete.

Wait, what?

Of course my work will not be complete when we roll out the workbench for all of our lessons; that’s just the beginning! There is still plenty of room for The Workbench to grow once it is released—that’s what I designed it for! But, just like I spend maybe a few hours per quarter on my packages from Grad School nowadays⁴, the infrastructure will reach a state of equilibrium where development is less of a day-to-day task and more of a weekly or monthly task. While I was hired to design, build, and maintain this infrastructure, I also need to find room to grow in my position.

Professional Development

One of the benefits of working for a small company is that there are always projects that can be done and improvements that can be made. This also happens to be one of the curses of working for a small company. Until now, I’ve always kind of taken professional development to mean “skills that I need to learn in order to complete the tasks that I need to complete.”

Examples of this form of PD would be me teaching myself Docker in Nebraska, struggling through vim in London, learning XPath syntax in lockdown to use the {tinkr} package, and learning Lua filters in Pandoc. All of these were skills that I needed immediately or soon to get my work done and not learning them was not an option (with the exception of vim, that was a self-inflicted wound).

Instead, professional development is taking time away from my normal work routine to focus on skills that I wish I had. These are skills that are not necessarily immediately applicable to my work, but may come in handy down the road in another context. I realize now that I did this kind of professional development while I was working with Sydney Everhart in Nebraska. My position was 1.0FTE for research, but she encouraged me to seek out additional skills that would strengthen my teaching aptitude. She encouraged me to apply for grants, such as a USDA grant for developing a course on reproducible research, which I worked on for a month and a half (but ultimately did not get). She also encouraged me to enroll in a course for postdocs and professors on active learning teaching practices.

This lead to the opportunity to develop a short workshop that introduces Plant Pathologists to R that uses these active learning principles. When I joined her lab, we did not plan on creating a workshop, but the skills I learned allowed us to realize that the need existed and that we had the skills to deliver it. Two years later, this workshop was one of the examples I used in my application to The Carpentries.

What? A Surprise

In July 2022, my supervisor, François Michonneau took a new job at Voltron Data after 4+ years at The Carpentries. In a small company like The Carpentries, one person with so much responsibility leaving has a big impact. In no small part, he was responsible for the way The Workbench the workbench looks today by not only providing experience and guidance of how lessons were developed and hosted, but also by advocating for protection of my time for deep thinking and continued support when I was in a state of self-sabotage.

His departure has forced me to think about my career in a broader scope. At the moment, I am at a comfortable place in my career: I do what I love, I get paid well for it, I work with really great people, and I work for a company that does public benefit work where day to day operations actually reflect its core values. But what happens when something changes? What if, someday, I leave The Carpentries?⁵ How do I best prepare myself for such a change (regardless of whether it is voluntary or involuntary) and how to I make sure that the wake I leave behind causes no more than a gentle rocking of my colleagues' proverbial canoes?

Recently, my new supervisor (Kari L. Jordan) suggested that I start thinking about my career trajectory regardless of whether it is inside or outside The Carpentries. In particular she wanted me to think about what I will be doing in The Carpentries after The Workbench is released. Maintenance work is still necessary and mission-critical, but it’s not as encompassing as designing, testing, and deploying a brand new infrastructure from the ground up.

With this in mind, How can I leverage the challenges faced with the Curriculum and Infrastructure teams to help bolster my own career growth? How can I make sure that, if there is a time that I need to leave The Carpentries, that I have the CV that gives me the skills to apply for a position that would better suit my needs? Importantly: How can I help Kari advocate for my growth as both my supervisor and as the Executive Director?

Ready Let’s Go

If I want to know where I’m going in terms of growth, I have to know where I am, so if I were to do an assessment of my skill set, how would I describe it? I think the best course of action would be to divide my skill sets into technical skills and practical skills⁶.

Technical Skills

In terms of technical skills, I am an avid Linux user, an expert in R⁷, proficient in python, I can hack around in JavaScript, XSLT, BASH, Make, and I know enough C to be dangerous. I also am proficient in creating GitHub actions workflows. Note that this is not an exhaustive list, but it gets at some of the skills I bring to the table in day-to-day operations.

Now, let’s think about the skills that I wish I had. And note, this is definitely not an exhaustive list.

Security 🔒

First and foremost: I wish I understood security better. Especially in a world where I’m making it easier for people to deploy lessons using The Workbench where any arbitrary code can be run in a GitHub Actions runner, I want to make sure that I’m setting people up for success and do not open people up to accidentally exposing information in workflows⁸.

Cloud Services ☁️

Moreover, I want to get better at understanding how to work with cloud services like AWS and DigitalOcean. When I was in my final year of grad school, Beatrice—a computer scientist I knew through our Grad Worker Union—gave me the advice to use my OSU email to get Amazon AWS credits to learn how to use it. I really wish I had taken her advice because the only cloud computing experience I got before coming to The Carpentries was on University Servers, which all run systems like SGE and SLURM that act nothing like AWS. At the moment, I am competent enough in AWS that I’m pretty sure I won’t break anything if I need to create or delete an S3 bucket, but training to understand how it works and all the features it offers would be better.

Native Application Development / Strongly-Typed Languages 🦀

One thing that has always eluded me is how to create standalone applications, either through web applications, a command line interface, or a native desktop application. I do not at the moment know how to create something that can be built and deployed for Mac, Windows, and Linux without going through an established program/language like R. Working with languages like TypeScript and Rust would help me achieve this. As a treat, I could also begin to start understanding WASM, because that seems to be the wave of the future.

Web Development: Frontend, Web Content Accessibility, and Offline Applications 🎨

I know some of the basics of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work and I am passingly familiar with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines, but my strength in those areas are definitely lacking. Part of the design of The Workbench is that we wanted to avoid relying on complex JavaScript manipulation that could prevent usage of the page if JavaScript is not enabled ( a la distill, which uses JS to render custom HTML tags), so a consulting company was hired to template the CSS, JS, and HTML from the Figma designs with the “minimal JS” specification. It works well, but now I have to maintain it 😰.

Moving Forward

Ultimately, if The Carpentries disappeared tomorrow, I’m fairly certain I would be able to get a job without any advancement in the above skills, but having these would make sure that I can avoid becoming “the R guy” in a world that has been taken over by rustacians swimming in a Digital Ocean.

So, how do I get there and how does this fit in with the broader goals for Curriculum and Infrastructure? Well, all of these things are definitely within the realm of professional development as they will definitely help enhance my CV. They are not mission-critical, but having these skills would definitely strengthen my skill set. Importantly, I believe that all of these are achievable in the next five years as professional development goals, and all of these have some form of certification component that can go along with them. The next question is now what is the rough timeline for the next five years?

• 2023-09: Frontend Certification
• 2024-09: WCAG 2.x certification
• 2025-09: Certified in AWS S3 and EC2 administration
• 2026-09: Rust development at the point where I can create CLI applictions
• 2027-09: Understand and Deploy WASM R applications

Maybe this is ambitious and maybe my priorities are not exactly in the right area, but I think this gives me good goals for what I should have in the next five years.

Practical Skills

In terms of practical skills, I am patient, experienced in evidence-based teaching, practice empathetic listening and non-violent communication, I am good at solving problems, and I am an effective communicator⁹.

Now here’s the easy thing: I like public speaking, but I find that I get cold feet when it comes to applying for speaking gigs. The solution is literally for me to just apply and see what happens. The hard thing is literally everything else.

Project Planning and Administration

Project planning is like kryptonite to me. I know the value of project planning, but for some reason, I get hella bogged down when I’m trying to figure out how much time a particular task is going to take and what are specific criteria for success. It’s ironic, because I really value practices like test-driven development, which ostensibly is project planning, but when it comes down to it, I have a hard time translating feels into practical values. I think this is partially because I often drill down into the details and get hung up when I hit one (1) unknown.

Grant Writing and Administration

Related to project planning is grant writing and grant management. I feel uncomfortable asking for a travel grant let alone a grant that would provide a year’s worth of my salary. That being said, I know this is the most effective way for a non-profit to get funded and I know it requires strong sales skills and strong project planning skills to actually get funded and deliver on the deliverables.

Moving Forward

Kari has already indicated that I should be looking at at least two talks per year, and applying for talks is a good use of my time there. But how do I accomplish the goals of Project Planning/Management and Grant Writing and Administration? Well, the good thing is that I am already doing these things. The goal is just that I need more practice doing these things and that they end up feeding into each other. So, how do I map these onto concrete goals for the next five years? One way is to come up with a plan for projects that I can plan for and help apply for funding in the next five years, but I’m going to need to stew on this a bit more 🤔.

Happy Cycling 🌇 🚲

The title of this post comes from the final track from the Boards of Canada album Music Has The Right To Children.

When I was in grad school, I lived several miles away in a separate town, so I ended up riding my bike for a half an hour to get to and from work. During these bicycle rides, I rode mainly on bicycle trails that passed through vast fields and I had a lot of time to think. On one of these bicycle rides, I was trying to wrap my head around how to solve a problem with recursion in poppr. It was at the end of a long stretch of trail that the solution popped into my head.

I think about this a lot when I get frustrated with my work. Sometimes, we need to step back from what we are doing and spin other wheels so that we don’t end up spinning our wheels. It also illustrates yet another metaphor: When I got to that point in the trail, I realised that I had no memory of the mile or so that I had previously ridden to get there. It makes me realize that when we are moving along doing something that comes so natural to us, we run on auto pilot and that’s the point at which we need to step back and bring in some new challenges.