Introduction (Wall of text incoming!)

[Raul Perez]

Hi everyone! Wall of text incoming!

I'm Raúl (or my personal brand that I use for all things engineering Florian Rand, long story), a software engineer from Spain, and I'm excited to finally become part of the Fedora community.

I've been using Linux for almost twenty years. I first discovered it in high school with Slackware, and it completely changed how I looked at computers. I remember buying a book about C programming on Unix systems just so I could better understand what was happening under the hood. I spent countless hours experimenting with things like libpcap, rebuilding tools such as tcpdump, and generally taking things apart to see how they worked.

Since then Linux has been my primary operating system. Over the years I've used Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE, and although Ubuntu is currently my daily workstation, I still use Fedora extensively for my development containers and have spent quite a bit of time running Silverblue. Somewhere at home I even have a couple of old Red Hat CDs that I've never been able to throw away.

Although I've relied on open source software for most of my career, my contributions have mostly been small and practical: reporting bugs, helping with translations, documentation improvements, and submitting patches that solved problems I encountered mysel.

Professionally, I started as a Linux systems administrator. One of my first self-appointed projects was converting a nearly 100-page handwritten notebook of operational procedures into reusable shell scripts. Nobody asked me to do it—I simply got tired of repeatedly looking things up and wanted to make the work easier for everyone. Looking back, that probably says a lot about how I approach engineering.

After several years in systems administration I took an unexpected detour into graphic design and digital production, working in the automotive industry. Even then I found myself gravitating back toward technical problems: helping with render farms, improving automation scripts, and solving infrastructure issues. Eventually I returned to software engineering full time.

Today I've worked across frontend and backend development, internal tooling, application modernization, CI/CD, containers, and developer experience. I've come to realize that what I enjoy most isn't any particular language or framework—it's understanding systems, removing unnecessary complexity, and making other people's work a little easier. The problems that attract me most are usually the ones everyone has learned to work around until someone finally decides to fix them properly.

Technically I'm comfortable with Linux, Git, shell scripting, containers (especially Podman), JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, C, Go, Ansible, CI/CD, and general software engineering. I've also done RPM and DEB packaging in the past, although I'd definitely appreciate a refresher.

Outside of work I spend far too much time tinkering with my homelab. I recently simplified it from a fairly involved Proxmox setup to a much simpler Podman + systemd Quadlets + Cockpit setup, and I'm irrationally happy with that decision. Away from the keyboard I enjoy running, science fiction, classical singing, and spending time with my cats.

As for Fedora, it feels like a natural place to contribute. I've admired the engineering culture around Fedora and Red Hat for many years—particularly the emphasis on building in the open and contributing work upstream—and I'd like to become part of that ecosystem. My plan is to start with small contributions, learn how the community works, and hopefully grow into taking on larger responsibilities over time.

I'm looking forward to meeting you all and learning where I can best contribute.