Greetings from a retired old ranch hand. I am back in the
Java business after all these years, if you can believe it.
I passed my
SCJP in May 2000 and helped moderate the jobs forum here. At that time I had a split career, doing evening shift programming and stats stuff for a NY city financial firm, and working as a pianist and music teacher/therapist by day. I passed the SCJP in the hopes of upgrading the tech side of my career, since I had a lot of programming chops that weren't being utilized. Right around that time though, the Java market was considered to be doing poorly in the US. I decided it was best to stick with my position and let Java be.
A few years later I made a career move into full time music education and therapy, teaching on contract in schools and after school. I moved up in the field so that curriculum design, assessment design, grant applications, and independent research became a lot of my work. I became really interested in the scientific questions behind the field and started getting into psychology and neuropsychology. I made my move back to school for a research PhD in the sciences, getting offered a Medical Physics PhD studentship in Edinburgh, where I'm developing some new imaging techniques (magnetic resonance elastography in particular) in order to use them study to various therapies, the funding is for medical but I hope to study music/movement ones in the end. So here I am in Scotland with a wife and three year old son.
My old SCJP cert was a key factor in convincing my supervisor I could hack the hard sciences - so talk about coming in handy after all. It probably saved me getting a one-year Masters here in the dept to prove I was up to snuff, on my own dime.
Well, it's been noticed that I have programming chops as they come in handy in a clinical imaging centre! (And that I just looove coding.) So here I am again. My programming so far has all been Unix and Python. However, I've decided to tackle the development of a new pipeline for MR elastography images in Java. This is in part becase the best route will probably be an ImageJ plug-in (a Java-based medical imaging program) but hopefully a standalone version will come out of it too. I'll need to integrate the Java Dicom toolkit as well as some MATLAB-like functionality that I'm sure Java can provide.
I see that this is still a heavily certification-focused site so I'm not sure if this is the place to look for help with these specific needs, or if I need to navigate the chaos of Stack Overflow, or if you have any suggestions. However, I have found that hanging around forums and helping people is the best possible way to stay limber with a particular set of skills (I try to warm up each day asking and answering a few questions on freemathhelp.com), so I'll see if I can find some reasons to hang out here too -- once I actually remember a few things!
As you can see I re-registered since I'm sure whatever old email was linked to this account is long dead. I leave it to the mods as to whether I should have my old ID re-instated or start afresh! I suppose it would be fun to have my old posts as part of my records.
See you around,
Eric
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