1:47 p.m.
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