I've been a professional programmer for about 10 years, and an academic/researcher who happened to program for about 10 years before that. The dividing line is somewhat arbitrary.

I've worked mostly in university and big, government-run laboratory settings. Just recently made the move to private industry. It's, ahem, somewhat different. I've been on big projects, small projects, good projects and really bad projects. I've been responsible for architecture, planning, testing, quality standards, IP, and just getting the damn code written.

Most of my work has been for physical simulations of some sort or another. Electromagnetism, hydrology, radiation. Now I'm in finance, which also has a surprising amount of mathematics to it.

I try to keep up with things going on in Haskell, even though I'm strictly a C++ programmer at work. Still working on fitting in the time for personal projects between the needs of family and work.

I like long walks on the beach and poking fun at my own profile. My pet peeves are bad code and bad tools.