User:Donovan

Introduction

My name is Donovan Jones. I am a software developer from New Zealand. I am a competent wiki editor and plan to assist the OSE in this capacity. I do not plan to collaborate or assist in other ways in the medium term. Essentially I am a WikiGnome, as such it is probably safe to ignore me.

Current objectives

• Improve metric support on the wiki.
• Work on Work_Log_Guidelines particularly Date_Format_Convention.
• Work on and improve categories.
• Wikifying pages: work on wiki linking.

Thoughts

As an outsider there are a few observations I would make about things that could be improved.

Support for the Metric System

Three countries use non-metric measurement systems: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. I believe for OSE to a have a global impact it needs better support for the metric system. Many collaborators will only be able to source metric parts. I want to help provide better metric support at leas on the wiki.

Wiki standards

Standards like the Date_Format_Convention are important in a wiki, they create consistency, help define a framework withing which people can become more productive and in general help to make the wiki more functional. As such I will be editing peoples Logs, please let me know if you would prefer I left them alone.

Date formats

I have a definite opinion about what the best date format is but I will not be converting dates to this format or pushing this other than recommending it here.

The best date format is the ISO 8601 format. It looks like this: 2012-11-27, compare this to 02/04/03 which has three possible interpretations. . The reasons it is best are:

• it is unambiguous.
• it sorts correctly using string or numeric sorting.
• it is a formal standard.
• it is widely used.

see also: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date

Other Skills

I do have some other skills that may be useful to the OSE. I am an experienced data munger, if you need scripts written to process and convert data feel free to drop me a line. Things like

• Writing cron jobs
• Talking to databases (postgres/mysql/sqlite)
• Pulling in xml,yaml,json,html,csv,wiki markup
• Spitting out xml,yaml,json,html,csv,wiki markup
• Talking to REST web services.
• Screen scraping and web automation.

My language of choice is perl. My collaboration method of choice is github.