Wycliffe Summer

February 20, 2006 at 12:48 pm · Filed under Wycliffe

What started with a tour last November has resulted in a summer internship. This summer, I’ll be working at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas, TX doing programming work for Wycliffe Bible Translators. I don’t know all of the details yet, but I know that I’ll be on the core programming team for a piece of software called FieldWorks Language Explorer.

There will be lots of new things to learn. The application is written in C# for Windows using Visual Studio 2005. That’s a language and programming environment I’ve never used before, but I will get some experience using them later this semester for Software Systems. I’ve heard good things about the language, and it will be neat to learn something new and get a fresh perspective on software development. All of the software there is developed using the Extreme Programming methodology. I’ve read about it before and it seems to have some really good ideas. One of the most obvious differences from other methodologies is that pair programming is used. This means that I’ll be sharing a computer with one of their full-time workers. I’ve done pair programming a few times for projects at LETU and it has always worked really well. I’m looking forward to see how it works in the “real world.”

However, the pair programming means the end of an era for me. After talking some with my supervisor for this summer, I decided that my preference for the Dvorak keyboard would cause too much confusion if I’m going to be constantly sharing computers. So, as of today, I’m switching back to Qwerty. I’ve been using Dvorak for about a year now, and according to a typing test I just took, I’m up to 80 WPM. This post is the longest thing I’ve typed in Qwerty since I made the switch, and I’m nowhere near 80 WPM. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly I’m able to get back to my old typing speed with Qwerty (which I think was actually a little higher than I got with Dvorak).

Please pray for my internship. I still need to find housing, financial support (the internship is on a volunteer basis), and work out lots of other little details. But most importantly, pray that I will allow God to make full use of me in this opportunity to use my skills to make a very real and practical impact in the effort to make the Word of God available to everyone.

I’m excited! :-)

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