Thread: Introduction

James,

* Corbett, James (James.Corbett@cra-arc.gc.ca) wrote:
> My name is Jim Corbett and I hail from Ottawa Canada where I work for the federal government as a Java Web developer.

Good to have you; unfortunately you just missed PgCon, which was held at
the University of Ottawa last week.  The list of talks which were held
is up at http://www.pgcon.org and many of those talks now have the
slides uploaded as well.  Other interesting places of information are
http://planet.postgresql.org, the PostgreSQL IRC channel (#postgresql on
irc.freenode.net), and, of course, http://www.postgresql.org where the
PostgreSQL documentation resides (which, in my view at least, is quite
excellent).

> I've been programming for the past twenty years, the last seven in the wonderful world of Java.

If you intended that sarcastically (hard to tell through email), then
you might be happy to learn that PostgreSQL is written entirely in C and
we could always use more C developers hacking on the backend. :)

> I'm looking forward to being part of this list.

Happy to have you!

    Thanks,

        Stephen

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:02 AM, Corbett, James
<James.Corbett@cra-arc.gc.ca> wrote:
> For those twenty years as a developer I should say that I have been
> completely blind, relying upon a screen review application known as JAWS and
> a Braille display.
>
> I’m looking forward to being part of this list.

Welcome! One thing I'm very happy with in today's world, as improved
on (say) two decades ago, is the way that computers have become
accessible to more people; back in the 90s, I was playing with some of
the speech navigation / speech synthesis tools that were available
then, and they seemed more like toys than anything truly usable. Sure,
you could get around without seeing the screen, but it was a struggle.
Today, legally or completely blind people can even play text
roleplaying games, thanks to years of smart development work.

You're now using what is, in my opinion, the best database engine in
the world. And it's language-agnostic, so you can happily use Java for
some things, Python for others, Pike if you've ever heard of it, and
even PHP if you're sadistic enough. I love it.

ChrisA

On 30 May 2013 14:48, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:02 AM, Corbett, James
> <James.Corbett@cra-arc.gc.ca> wrote:
>> For those twenty years as a developer I should say that I have been
>> completely blind, relying upon a screen review application known as JAWS and
>> a Braille display.
>>
>> I’m looking forward to being part of this list.
>
> Welcome! One thing I'm very happy with in today's world, as improved
> on (say) two decades ago, is the way that computers have become
> accessible to more people; back in the 90s, I was playing with some of
> the speech navigation / speech synthesis tools that were available
> then, and they seemed more like toys than anything truly usable. Sure,
> you could get around without seeing the screen, but it was a struggle.
> Today, legally or completely blind people can even play text
> roleplaying games, thanks to years of smart development work.
>
> You're now using what is, in my opinion, the best database engine in
> the world. And it's language-agnostic, so you can happily use Java for
> some things, Python for others, Pike if you've ever heard of it, and
> even PHP if you're sadistic enough. I love it.


Can I just say that I love being on this list.

In the past I have asked some pretty daft questions, but the responses
here have always been patient and helpful.