Blog Week 1 - Kia Orana from Rarotonga

Kia Orana from Rarotonga

My name is Evan and I'm currently living in Rarotonga in the beautiful Cook Islands were I am studying a BSc in Computer Science minoring in Maths. Up until my wife and I (along with our two year old daughter Izzy and dog Pepe) moved to the middle of the pacific I was working as a Developer Services Engineer (DevOps) at Weta Digital in Wellington.

I've never had any formal training in IT so the four years or so I spent working there were a constant learning experience where most people assumed I understood fundamental computing concepts when quite often there were gaping holes in my knowledge. I learned fast but unfortunately those holes in my knowledge could lead me to accidentally break parts of our infrastructure, and on occasion such breakages were so bad hundreds of people would have to be sent home for the afternoon unable to work because I had completely destroyed the main database server on which 99% of the company depended... whoops.

While at Weta I also rubbed shoulders with the most amazing people, some with PhDs in computer science, physics or maths and others with multiple doctorates; people that had written core UNIX tools that are ubiquitous, others that had discovered how to graphically simulate millions of strands of hair on a virtual ape. Seeing the depth and breadth of knowledge at Weta really made me want to study, even within my first year there I knew I wanted to eventually get some sort of Computer Science qualification. The problem was I just didn't have any time between the fifty plus hour work weeks and a young child at home.

My wife Sarah, who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arrived home one evening asking if we could consider moving to either Samoa or Rarotonga. I saw this as a chance to do the study I wanted and so just over a year ago when we found out we would be moving to Rarotonga I enrolled in the beginnings of my degree. I tried to find as many papers related to topics like artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmics, etc. so I've ended up enrolling in a mixture of Maths, Philosophy, Communications, Physics, Statistics as well as Computer Science papers to round it all out.

I wanted to take this particular paper so I would be able to read and write technical documents with better understanding and understandability and also disassemble complex concepts and translate them in lay terms which makes for better procedural documentation. I'm reasonably confident reading and understanding technical documents written by others but when it comes to writing them I am not so strong. 

So who knows, maybe in another five or six years our little family might find itself in Geneva where Sarah could work for a New Zealand government post or maybe even the UN and I could put the comms skills learned in this course, along with the rest of my degree, to good use at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) where I would take almost any job: junior systems engineer, IT Support, as working at CERN is my biggest ambition.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the course and becoming much better at reading and writing science.


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