IT Core Spotlight: Jayandra Pokharel

Spotlight Date: October 08, 2015

• Name: Jayandra Pokharel
• Birthplace: Kathmandu, Nepal
• Project: IPUMS
• Favorite Dev Tool: Macbook Pro
• Fun Fact: A mosquito has 47 teeth whereas a dog has only 42. Interesting!!!

What brought you to your current professional field and eventually to the MPC? I had some experience in Ruby On Rails and was planning on continuing in it. So, after graduating from University Of Idaho I started looking for RoR positions and saw the vacancy in MPC. Accordingly, I applied for it and got hired.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve gotten to work on at the MPC? I am on the IPUMS team at MPC. The IPUMS project is a family of 10 different microdata projects that share the same codebase. Each of these microdata projects is further comprised of four different environments. The extensive use of environment variables to differentiate an individual project from 40 possible combinations (10 projects * 4 environments per project) is pretty awesome.

When you’re not wrangling data at the MPC, what other things keep you busy? When not at the MPC I usually find myself hanging out with friends, biking, watching movies/documentaries, going for a walk, etc…

How do you get to work? I live close to the university so I often walk or bike to work. During winter when neither is possible I take the bus.

What new skill(s) are you currently trying to learn? I have been trying to learn Android programming but haven’t been able to make a strong commitment to it. However, it is still at the top of my list.

What is your experience working at the MPC? The MPC is a great place to work. The people here are very nice and friendly. It has been almost a year since I joined the MPC, and I have been liking it a lot.