Greetings Y'all!
My name is Jake, I'm a dad who moonlights as a data center technician/supervisor in Dallas, Texas, US. I'm proudly neurodivergent (ADHD) and thus when I tried to list some of my hobbies, figured the body of the email could serve better purposes.
I came to the tech/IT world after getting a degree in marketing, then realizing after about a year in the workforce I didn't actually want to be a copywriter. I ended up taking an IT job - since I'd been a help desk technician for the entirety of my time in college - and then realizing I absolutely loved doing that instead. I'm currently working on my Linux+ and Network+ certifications, learning to program in Python, and having fun monkeying around with Docker/Kubernetes in my humble homelab. One of my many hobbies lately is trying to self-host as many of my quality-of-life applications as I can, so have been learning a lot about containers and virtualized solutions.
I'm finding that jack-of-all-trades is a common animal to encounter in the IT world, and I'm no different. A few of the hats I currently wear (or have worn at some point) are:
- Server administration
- Technical writing
- Content/copy writing
- Audio and video editing
- Software and hardware QA
- Application and infrastructure deployment
- Probably have at least some knowledge/interest in a few dozen things beyond this
In terms of Linux, I have gone from "well I have this old computer and I'm too broke for a Windows license" to "I don't know why I ever used anything else" in the span of about 10 years. Started with a JoliOS netbook borrowed from my brother for college, moved onto Ubuntu, and lived there for a while as my go-to distro. However, the longer I worked in the IT world, the more of the Linux family I was exposed to, so I thought it prudent to learn. I picked up Fedora because it was in the same ecosystem as CentOS (a distro I interact with often at work) and then loved it. I've now got an old ThinkPad T420 running Fedora 36 with GNOME (and running it very well, I might add), a newer gaming machine I've got multi-booted with Fedora 36 KDE, Garuda Dragonized, and Windows 10, and lately my go-to VM in the workplace has become Fedora 36 XFCE. There's too many cool things about the different desktop environments to just use one, but Fedora has been so intuitive and the community so helpful that I've come to love it.
And thus begins this, my first foray into the world of being a FOSS contributor. It's something I thought about a lot these past few years and decided to finally start doing. I've really come to embrace the philosophy and practical benefits of the open source ideology, especially as my skills and awareness have grown these past few years, so happy to finally get involved. In practical terms, I think I'd make a decent contributor to any technical documentation, as well as community-generated content like Fedora Magazine or the Fedora Podcast. I'm also happy to lend any hardware I can get my hands on to the cause to help with testing.
Speaking of the Fedora Podcast, I had already found Fedora before the podcast, but the podcast is definitely what pointed me in the direction of becoming a contributor. The content was fantastic and the community-focused stuff definitely gave me the desire to participate.
Anyways, as I always do, I've been pretty long-winded here. Happy to answer any questions or address anything I might have left out, though!
Kindest Regards,
Jake AKA ChilidogGarand