William O'Mullane
William O'Mullane has worked on space science projects since 1996 when he assisted with the production of the Hipparcos CDROMS for the European Space Agency. During this period he was also involved with the Planck and Integral science ground segments as well as contemplating the Gaia data processing problem.From 2000-2005 he worked on developing the US National Virtual Observatory (NVO) and on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. In August 2005 he rejoined the European Space Agency as Gaia Science Operations Development Manager to lead the European Space Astronomy Centre development effort for Gaia and work with the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium to produce the Gaia catalogue. In 2017 he moved to Rubin Observatory (LSST) as Data Management Project Manager in Tucson, USA. He is now the Rubin Deputy Project Manager for software responsible for Data Management, telescope control and IT in general.
Session
In this presentation we will cover some astronomy design patterns and perhaps some anti-patterns in astronomy. We will use our experience on several long projects such as Rubin Observatory, Gaia, SDSS, UKIRT and JCMT to highlight some of the the things which worked and a few things that did not work so well. For example separation of data access from data format is common across all of our projects and something we find critical. The Rubin Science Platform (and deployment system) underpinned by infrastructure as code is also a culmination of many previous efforts.