Well, here's a thing. Over the past year my positing has been squished around a lot. Like, A Lot A Lot. I came into this institution, and this field, with a deep interest in research data management and the issues therein and here, just a handful of years later find myself heading deep in the world of open source software projects. How'd that happen? Let's see...
At my previous place of work I was deeply involved with the creation of a nascent data services program. We didn't get everything done there (who does?) but we did get the machine started and, hopefully, I left something behind that those who followed found useful. In moving to my current institution I was tasked with splitting my work across data services and management of an institutional repository. In a way this made a lot of sense - we had a data specialist taking care of all of the public facing data work, and doing a great job, and i gather what was expected was a little more of the back end data work in the repository. Super fun, i thought - repositories are pretty cool (though I had no experience as a repo man at that time). Then we decided to launch a repository migration project and here I sit, two years later, doing exclusively repository work - product owning, going to repository conferences, sitting in on calls, all that good stuff.
I love this repository work, it's way more exciting then I thought it could be. I get to work with great people here at at institutions the world over, have interesting problems to solve, and feel like I'm contributing to something big (ish). But, data sits on the back burner for me now and that's something I feel a bit sad about sometimes. Jobs change, sure, but i've passed by my raison d'être and moved on to other things. I'll still see the data folks i've grown to love, but less frequently than the already infrequent amount. Hopefully we can all stay in touch.