One of my friends posed a perfectly reasonable question in response to my last few blog posts. Something along the lines of, “Uhhh, what’s with all this galavanting about – didn’t you say you were headed to Australia for work?”

Sorry – yes. But I did come a few days early. For, uh, jetlag. So that I’d be properly acclimated. And getting out and about is the best way to get yourself adjusted, right?

But yes, this is, primarily, about work. Spoiler: no actual singing involved, but these next four days I’m getting to justify my presence down here, spending my days intensively meeting with, problem-solving and brainstorming with the scientists and engineers who are driving New Zealand and Australia’s marine climate data acquisition programs.

First impression: they’re all so young!

Second impression: they’re all so frighteningly smart and accomplished!

I mean, really. We started out yesterday with some high-level show and tell. A lot of the technical consulting I do with OpenRVDAS consists of walking people through the installation script, explaining that no, you don’t need that option, and that,  when you tell me it’s breaking, will you at least please tell me what error message it’s giving you when it does?

In contrast, the first feedback I heard from the folks at CSIRO was, “So, we installed and deployed your system on our ship; we like it, but there were a few things that didn’t work the way we wanted, so we fixed and improved them – would you like us to send you the code updates?” I’ve already told you about the Australian Antarctic Division, but yesterday morning Lewis, the new hire for New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, meekly showed us the entirely new front end graphic interface he’d “just cobbled together” to make the data presentation more to his liking. I’m not the only one who was kind of gobsmacked.

Also: they’re all so kind and supportive! Throughout all the first day, frantically scrambling as I was to take in all the innovation and great new ideas (“Wait – what’s ‘psycopg’? ‘TimescaleDB’?” “Your pattern matchers each have their own unit test?”), not one of them, not even for a moment, betrayed anything that could have been taken as a look of “Try to keep up, old man…”

It’s humbling to have such competent and dedicated folks throwing their time into using and improving this system. But it’s also more than a bit intimidating – they’re entrusting their countries’ research programs to…a system I wrote?!? What if it turns out to not be any good? (Ye’ olde imposter syndrome, amiright?)

I guess, if nothing else, it’s a call to cowboy up and rise to the occasion. Apparently I’m doing something that really matters to these people. That’s worth singing about. :-)