Introduction - jpattonwx

[Jason Patton]

Greetings to you, Fedora Infrastructure Team!

My name is Jason, and I am a graduate student at Iowa State University
working on my PhD in agricultural meteorology. My enthusiasm for
certain aspects of a purely academic career has waned, though, which
is part of what brings me here. Over the last few months, I have
started exploring a few other careers which I might enjoy while being
comfortable learning the new skills required, and I have found systems
administration to be most intriguing. In trying to find some
experience beyond mucking about with my own home network, I messaged a
fellow here at ISU (who happens to be a Fedora Campus Ambassador).
Checking out the Infrastructure group here was one of his suggestions,
and so here I am.

My experience with Fedora itself is fairly short, only going back to
F10. However, my Linux experience extends back to 2004 when I arrived
at ISU (a RHEL subscribing campus) as an undergrad in the meteorology
department, which primarily uses RHEL in its labs.
Administration-wise, my only semi-real experience so far has been
building a one-off (yeah, I know) system for our research group. Its
functions are to scrape an ESA FTP server every hour for new satellite
data, organize the data so that it can be read by a particular Matlab
API (for the other researchers in our group), and push some converted
data to our mesonet site (run our department's actual sysadmin) for
display on the web. While it's not much, it has given me experience
learning and setting up RAID, writing bash and python scripts, using
cron, and maintaining applications in a production(ish) environment.

What I can mainly bring to this group is an eagerness to learn. The
main reason why I find sysadmin work interesting is because of the
opportunity to learn (and use!) something new every day. However, I do
hope that my python, bash, etc. skills are enough to be able to
contribute in some small ways early on. And I hope to be a part of
this project and contribute for a long time... the Fedora Project (and
FOSS in general) is too important to just stop by, pick up some
skills, and then head off into the desert.

Please let me know how I may be able to help you. I'll be in
#fedora-admin under username jpattonwx (also my FAS username). I can
easily commit an hour or two every weekday afternoon or evening to
this project.

Thank you!

Jason Patton