Who Am I?
Technology has been part of my life for as long as I can conceivably remember. Back in the HeathKit days of the mid- to late 70s my dad would build our entertainment items (tv, stereo, game console, etc.) When the kit computers started coming out we built them and rocked out. I still remember sitting at the table with a copy of Popular Science in my lap while I painstakingly entered the program code into our Timex/Sinclair ZX-81.
Fast-forward a few years (ok, maybe more than a few) and I’m making a living sitting in front of a computer pounding out code. At least we’ve moved beyond storing things on tape drives and praying the counter didn’t accidentally get reset.
For the past ten years or so I’ve spent my days knocking out web services. The language du jour had been Java and it’s served me well. My job now involves a bit more of the behind-the-scenes work so I’m knocking the cobwebs off some old skills. Since I am now neck-deep in the Kubernetes ecosystem, it made sense for me to transition to Go. It’s a fabulous language and I love coding with it. I also realized that my Go web services consumed significantly fewer resources in both CPU and memory. Now, I find myself writing a lot of command-line utilities to help manage OpenShift clusters.
After 22 years in the financial services industry, I made a move and switched to telecom. I won’t say which one, but I now manage OpenShift for one of the big 3 telecom providers. Our platform is responsible for hosting workloads running internal business services, client-facing retail apps, and core network services.
Why runlevl4?
Well, the short answer is that “runlevel4” was taken. 😉 But that’s probably not what you’re wondering. As a Linux-related blog, I figured the site is user-definable. I’ve started this blog to chronicle my quest towards Red Hat Linux certification. However, I’ve never really been big on certs. Weird, huh? As I’m working through it I’ll try to keep it on track. If something derails that process, though, I’ll just re-define the site. Get it now?
I plan on throwing in anything I find along the way that I use as additional reading/training materials. Hopefully if this is an area you find to be of interest you’ll pick something up (or share) along the way.
Since my daily job makes use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I run CentOS at home. This site will be mostly focused on these two distributions.