| layout | title | permalink |
|---|---|---|
page |
About |
/about/ |
This a space for me to scribble down problems I encounter, things I learn, stuff I might need later and probably won't be able to find again as well as a place for me to share with like-minded.
January 2019, at the age of 42, I graduated from Business Academy Aarhus with an AP degree in Computer Science. I am currently employed at a media company and my daily tasks are related to maintaining and developing our content providing platform and infrastructure. During my employment I have been exposed to a variety of technologies and languages, both legacy and not, and have found it to be an excellent workplace for me as a recently graduated software and systems developer.
Technical matters did not appeal to me at a younger age but I started drifting in a more technical direction in my early twenties when I bought my first PC. Being a flat broke student it had to be as cheap as possible and came in parts for me to assemble. It was a 400MHz AMD K6-2 with a whopping 64MB 100MHz SD-RAM and a 15.1GB IBM hard disk. Now, this was 1999 and production quality of low-end hardware was, well, not great and as such the build presented a wide range of problems during it's lifetime. Adding to that apparently I had a knack for tinkering with the operating system and very often break it. While frustrating at the time I should probably look back at this period with some sort of gratitude. It did after all provide quite an amount of learning as well as introduce me to the joy of problem solving.
In the early 2000s a relative of mine introduced me to the concepts of open source software. It might have been related to Sun Microsystems open sourcing Star Office, I really cannot remember anymore. This eventually led me to Linux and in the following years I increasingly gravitated towards this while still dual booting. Safe to say, my first attempt at installing Linux, it might have been Debian Woody or Potato, failed miserably. Realising I did not know what I needed in order to accomplish this I did a little research and eventually settled on a using Slackware as a learning experience. Although learning and being happy with Slackware's simplicity and frugality, I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of package management or more specifically lack of package dependency management. At this point I moved to the, at the time, fairly new distribution Arch Linux which adhered very strongly to the KISS principle. While the learning curve was steep I stuck with Arch for a number of years and contributed to the community by maintaining a few PKGBUILDs for the AUR, answering questions in the forums and writing documentation.
In 2004 World of Warcraft was released. As many others I found the immersive universe appealing and as the universe progressed and expanded, I engaged myself in competitive endgame raiding. This led to raid leading and eventually guild management in a european guild. During this period I wrote a few addons mainly for the benefit of the guild and myself. I maintained these engagements for a few years until personal priorities changed as focus was more needed elsewhere. Meanwhile I started writing simple websites in HTML and PHP for fun, this was while some seemed to think that XHTML would actually be a thing. Still running Linux I wrote a small collection of Bash scripts to automate some tasks I found myself repeating and a few simple Python applications for system management tasks, some of which were submitted to the AUR.
Eventually Arch Linux switched from a fixed to a rolling release model, yes, this has been a while, and the transition was rough as the Arch developers were learning as they went. This meant I had to stay atop of it with constant system maintenance. If I did not update my systems daily, I often found that either the systems simply broke during update or they fell too far behind causing the package manager to fail to resolve dependencies thus leaving the system in an not updatable state. Not having the time to contribute in any other way than filing bug reports nor having the time for this excessive form of system maintenance I started to look at other options. During the next few years I tried out quite a few different distributions. There is really no need to mention them all as there are a lot, let's just say it covers all major and many minor distributions some many of which no longer exists. While all had their merits I kept returning to Debian as the only distribution that I "felt at home in", this is pretty odd as I initially thought of it as restrictive and archaic. Up until this point I mostly have had non-technical blue-collar jobs.
Since then and up until I started studying I have had various technically related jobs, eventually thinking that getting an education in this line of work would be the obvious choice as it clearly was what I wanted to do anyway.