First Post

After 17 years at Red Hat, I’m moving on.

Looking back, I worked on the first iterations of several teams when Red Hat was much smaller.  Much of that time, the general feeling was that everyone was taking on a world of responsibilities.  People still describe Red Hat the same way, but back in the day we were always concerned that one mistake could tank the entire company.  I’m convinced that raw willpower and some incredible support staff allowed the company enough extra power to survive the dotcom bubble.

I’ve done phone and email tech-support, developer support, and QA. I tested the installer, kernel, LAMP stack, and much of the glue holding that together. I also worked with virtualization, which I parlayed into work in documentation. Before that, I was initially a systems administrator, and I’ve tried to stay grounded with that perspective.

In college, the powers that be told us that 80% of the software life cycle is in maintenance. So, repeatedly testing the same piece of software as it slowly advances. Fortunately I worked on a variety of projects I was already curious about. I also like to solve puzzles and building things, and QA includes a lot writing and maintaining programs and scripts to do the job. There’s also some exploratory system administration to shake things up.

Writing has been a passion of mine since I was a kid.  Most of the time, I’ve flexed those creative muscles writing fiction.  But my first salaried job was basically technical writing. When I took a break from engineering near the end of last year I started writing again, this time for software documentation instead of IT consulting. It’s gratifying and helped round out my perspective and better understand what engineers look like to the rest of the world.

Now I’m nearing the end of a break from the tech world, aside from a hobby or two in electronics. I wrote half of a science fiction novel. Remember how I said 80% of software engineering is maintenance? With writing, 80% of the work is editing. I like editing, so I could do that as well as writing. But more importantly at the moment, I can write blog articles and might make more use of those skills here.