My dad was a pretty big factor. He worked for a series of tech companies in the 80s and 90s (DEC, Zoom Telephonics, etc.), so our home always seemed to be on the bleeding edge - we got DSL in 1997, Wi-Fi in 2000, etc. The 386 PC was part of the home since I was about three.
He rescued an old Compaq 486 for me out of a dumpster at work when I was seven. I got to "help" install Windows 3.1 off a SyQuest drive, and in the ensuing years helped install/configure staples like a Sound Blaster, a CD drive, a Super VGA card, and the like. I broke this machine _a lot_. Eventually, I started learning to fix it myself.
In 2001 he built a PC from scratch. This PC ran Mandrake 8.1, which was a completely new paradigm to both of us. Although he abandoned it, I was hooked - I'd go spend time in the basement just to tinker with it, even though I had my own perfectly capable PC upstairs. Eventually I got a discarded Pentium machine and installed a slightly newer Mandrake on it.
By 2008, I had several such discarded machines. I think at this point I was running Debian on them, Mandrake having become Mandriva (and generally awful).
In college, I was "that guy" who ran Linux in a VM, and could do all of the lab work remotely from my dorm with X forwarding off the big, beefy Solaris boxes. I even bought a tablet PC off eBay, installed Linux on it (I think it was Ubuntu), and got permission from many professors to sub out a TI-83 for MATLAB, again running via forwarding.
I got a job out of college doing at-scale release and infrastructure management, starting with just a bunch of shell scripts, eventually graduating to tools like Chef and Ansible, later Docker and later still orchestrators like Kubernetes. At my second job I learned way more than I wanted to about how the Linux kernel worked, due to a kernel bug that sometimes robbed us of about 400MB of memory.
I decided to switch to Linux (Fedora) full-time in 2015, and haven't looked back.
In short:
- I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who cared about tech.
- I was also incredibly lucky to grow up when discarded tech was still a useful learning tool. (Can a five-year-old tablet even speak modern TLS these days?)
- I loved finding new ways to use and learn about Linux, and I grasped at many chances.
He rescued an old Compaq 486 for me out of a dumpster at work when I was seven. I got to "help" install Windows 3.1 off a SyQuest drive, and in the ensuing years helped install/configure staples like a Sound Blaster, a CD drive, a Super VGA card, and the like. I broke this machine _a lot_. Eventually, I started learning to fix it myself.
In 2001 he built a PC from scratch. This PC ran Mandrake 8.1, which was a completely new paradigm to both of us. Although he abandoned it, I was hooked - I'd go spend time in the basement just to tinker with it, even though I had my own perfectly capable PC upstairs. Eventually I got a discarded Pentium machine and installed a slightly newer Mandrake on it.
By 2008, I had several such discarded machines. I think at this point I was running Debian on them, Mandrake having become Mandriva (and generally awful).
In college, I was "that guy" who ran Linux in a VM, and could do all of the lab work remotely from my dorm with X forwarding off the big, beefy Solaris boxes. I even bought a tablet PC off eBay, installed Linux on it (I think it was Ubuntu), and got permission from many professors to sub out a TI-83 for MATLAB, again running via forwarding.
I got a job out of college doing at-scale release and infrastructure management, starting with just a bunch of shell scripts, eventually graduating to tools like Chef and Ansible, later Docker and later still orchestrators like Kubernetes. At my second job I learned way more than I wanted to about how the Linux kernel worked, due to a kernel bug that sometimes robbed us of about 400MB of memory.
I decided to switch to Linux (Fedora) full-time in 2015, and haven't looked back.
In short: - I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who cared about tech. - I was also incredibly lucky to grow up when discarded tech was still a useful learning tool. (Can a five-year-old tablet even speak modern TLS these days?) - I loved finding new ways to use and learn about Linux, and I grasped at many chances.