Hello everyone! I'm Paul. Aggraxis is my username. Some of you may know me from other places. If so, hello again! I want to say up front that despite having been around the block a few times, this is my very first time actually posting to a mailing list. I hope that this message winds up being readable and finds you in good spirits.
You can usually find me on Discord (Again, as Aggraxis), which is probably my preferred chat platform these days just because of how many other things seem to be tied in there. We use MS Teams at work. (Eww, I know...) My first experience with Matrix was when I registered my Fedora account and sought out the Fedora-join SIG to start the onboarding workflow. It reminds me of IRC from back in the 90s, but with some of its own quirks and oddities. I think it's fun that we have so many different options because people of varying backgrounds with different ideas decided to sit down and make something. I’m an 80’s kid who was a huge computer nerd growing up only to become a professional computer nerd as an adult. I love tinkering and experimenting. I grew up in a Commodore household (C64/128, several Amigas), learned Windows out of an academic and professional necessity, and eventually found myself tinkering with Debian and a few other distributions in my late teens. Watching my first kernel compile was an eye-opening experience. I spent about 7 years in the Networking world doing all things Cisco, which I thoroughly enjoyed until I was responding to alerts at 2 AM while trying to bottle feed my firstborn. During my time there I developed an intimate working knowledge of all things routing and switching (which has changed and evolved in some ways over the years, other ways not so much). I spent about the next 7 years as a civil servant in the super boring, but super lucrative (compared to my previous reimbursement at the time) world of government acquisitions. The key takeaway from that time was that it gave me the opportunity to refine my ability to translate technical jargon into common language that targets managers and decision makers. Since then I have been working for a series of defense contractors (my current employer is amazing) serving as an system administrator on the core infrastructure team for a series of software test systems. I work with VMware products, possibly Proxmox soon, Windows (client and server), RHEL (7, 8, and 9), Ubuntu, NetApp storage arrays, and a bunch of other fun stuff like Ansible (I could write YAML playbooks all day long and be happy) as well as lots and lots of STIG work. (Yuck, but it pays the bills!) I know enough Python to be dangerous in the workplace. I became curious after my initial exposure to Ansible. I took C,C++, and Java back in my college days, but I doubt I could reliably create something useful using that knowledge these days. We use an internal gitlab server in the office, so I'm familiar enough with git to do things like create branches and submit merge requests, but some of the other things you can do just haven't popped up in my day-to-day experiences yet. I’ve been doing that long enough that now I’m ‘the boss’ for the team of contractors supporting the ongoing work there. I spent a lot of time hiring and mentoring new talent coming in, trying to develop the next batch of mad computer scientists to take things to the next level. I should note that I am volunteering entirely in my personal capacity, and my involvement does not constitute any kind of endorsement by my employer or our customer(s). Even so, I am very glad to be here! I use Fedora on my laptop at home. Yeah, we also still have Windows in the house. It pays to stay proficient with the systems you work with. I also have a small homelab setup where I run a few VMs. (I just finished moving everything at home from VMware to Proxmox as a learning/fun exercise.) I also do a bit of gaming in my spare time, but I’m at that point where I’m looking to put some of that time and energy back into something Good. Hopefully you’ll see me out and about somewhere in the Fedora community! -- _______________________________________________ fedora-join mailing list -- fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to fedora-join-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
