Hi there! My name is Omer. I’m a software engineer.
I’ve had a rather unorthodox career path: I got my first software development job straight out of high school, and worked as a software engineer from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. I then spent about 15 years as an academic linguist, all the while nurturing my techie skillset on the side. In 2022, I decided to resign my tenured faculty position as a professor of linguistics and return to software engineering.
These days, I you can find me at Sylabs Inc., where I work on developing & maintaining high‑performance virtualization software.
Some other things:
If you’re interested in stuff I produced in academia, try my old academic homepage.
Recent blog posts:
Now that I’ve started my new tech gig, I’ve been reflecting on the issue of remote work. (The company I work for is fully remote.) Here are some thoughts about remote work, academia, and the latter’s attitude towards the former.
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How I found a job on Mastodon
As I’ve discussed here before, this past spring I made a decision to resign my position as a tenured Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, and to (eventually, after a bit of a break) return to my roots as a software engineer.
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The did-do list
Someone who I follow in the Fediverse posted a tiny, throwaway joke this morning:
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Some random reflections on leaving academia
Today marks exactly 229 days since my resignation from the University of Maryland took effect. Which is an extremely meaningless number. (Well, it is prime, so that’s something.) But for whatever reason, it felt like a good day to reflect a little bit about my departure from academia, now that...
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My favorite podcasts
(as of right now, anyway...)
I felt like putting together a list of my favorite podcasts and making it a Pinned Toot™️ on my Mastodon profile. But since I wanted to say a bit more about each podcast, the text quickly became too long for that medium, so I decided to put it here, instead....
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