My name is Sjoerd and I moved from The Netherlands to Oxford about 5 years ago, where I have been working as a technical consultant for a limited company. While I still enjoy the work I do, the more I learn about corporate structures and alternative ways to organise work, the more I start to feel like I would be more at home at a co-op if possible. I found out about CoTech, so I decided to make an account on these forums to try and test the waters a little and see where else I could put my skills to use.
My background is in physics and mathematics and in my job I do a lot of programming in Wolfram Language (WL, also known as Mathematica), which from a practical perspective is a bit like a Lisp. I realise that this is not a very highly sought-after skill per say, but then again: there arenât many people in the wild with a good background in WL so it could just as well be a unique selling point, I suppose. At any rate, I donât consider myself to be a pure programmer but more of a maths/science/programmer hybrid with a bit of data-scientist thrown in. I have a broad interest and really enjoy working on technical problems that exist on the interface of these disciplines. I also have a bit of an educational streak and enjoy making abstract knowledge accessible to others.
You can check out some of my own work on Github and I also wrote a few blog posts you can check out if you wish.
I visited Oxford some years ago for a functional programming language conference (ICFP) some years ago. I am also interested in Mathematics although I am no expert For example, I heard from many people how dual numbers could be used for automatic differentiation and basically that entails redefining operations in basic arithmetic, etc - but I donât known anything more than this
My ideal worker coop would thrive on democratic participation of people with all sorts of backgrounds and creating amazing services/products by combining their skills.
With that approach, the coop will exist for one clear purpose - to outcompete undemocratic (or almost all ânormalâ) companies
Oh, nice :). I actually knew some people involved with functional programming in Oxford, though I didnât study there myself (I graduated in Eindhoven). And youâre right: I think programming and science/maths in particular are very natural disciplines for co-operative organisation of labour. All you really need is a computer, some office space and some servers; itâs not a capital-heavy endeavour. Itâs surprising itâs not discussed more, if you ask me.
Yes, this is precisely my point and it does get itching that this is not discussed moređ .
I am currently thinking of starting some useful free software project that serves some niche needs for enterprises (such as legacy software conversion tool) backed by the worker cooperatives and use that as the foot in the door
For example, I heard from many people how dual numbers could be used for automatic differentiation and basically that entails redefining operations in basic arithmetic, etc - but I donât known anything more than this 