bbrock – Page 2

I’ve run Fedora on my desktops and home server since it was Red Hat Linux, back in 1996. When I started work in tech support, the first task of any support engineer was to install your desktop system. Cakewalk. It was the first time I’d ever run a kernel directly from a software organization, rather than building my own. I was skeptical. That skepticism served me very well in QE.

Now that I’ve got some time to spare, I’ve got some home projects that I might work on.

I’ve got a network server in need of an upgrade, waiting for time that I can take down the computer network for a couple of hours. I’ve got a hosting provider with several sites that needs to be organized. Including ever getting email, and assigning an IP from one of my domains to my home system.

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi in the garage. I’ve been using it to burn arduino images, but it might find another purpose. After all, who can’t use a server or desktop in their garage?

I haven’t gamed much in the past few months, and I miss that. I tend to play Blizzard games, and have been on WoW in particular for… 7 years? 9 years? I’ll settle for a half-dozen guilds and one vanity guild with my wife. I can’t remember the last time I ran an instance.

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.

Author: bbrock

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