It was a dark and stormy night, and I decided it was about time that I took some of the things I’ve learned over the past 2 decades of working and commit them to the internet so I could be ridiculed by the world. This is that medium.
I began my career after pursuing a dual major of Computer Science and Philosophy at RPI in upstate New York (quite the change from the suburbs of Chicago). From there I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do (who really does in their early 20s) so I moved to Dallas and began life as a sudo DBA learning Perl (and hence beginning my love affair) and administering a corporate trouble ticketing system called Remedy for Bell Northern Research. I was introduced to a new operating system called Linux (I remember the joy of RedHat 1.0 the mother’s day release – it was amazing) and a somewhat cool website called slashdot where I joined early (I’m user 121)! From there, I wasn’t sure I enjoyed data more than coding, so I went to work at Texas Instruments working some C code on an X-Windows application used for monitoring wafer defects (<boring>). I couldn’t picture myself coding 8 hours a day every day, so I made a change – ultimately deciding between consulting for Informix and being a unix system administrator for IBM. I chose less money and went with consulting – and never looked back.