Greetings Fedora Infrastructure Team,

My name is T.C. Williams and my IRC nick is austinpowered.

I'm a semi-retired life-long learner looking to give back and learn some new skills. I know a little bit about a lot of things and I have a long history of learning how to solve the problem at hand. I would consider myself more of a sysadmin than a developer these days but that's mostly because of my recent experiences.

In high school, I wrote my first program in BASIC to play blackjack on an ASR-33 teletype. After studying digital hardware design in college I worked for different companies writing software for automated test equipment. I was working for a storage sub-system company when I was tasked with writing a device driver to support our storage systems on the IBM PC and the recently released MS-DOS 2.0.

After the first version was released, I wrote a custom BIOS for a SCSI host adapter (ISA bus) and an updated device driver in assembly. With this adapter and a custom disk partitioning utility (written in C), multiple physical drives could be pooled to provide multiple logical volumes under MS-DOS. This was 1985 and it would be many years before I got paid to write code again.

The following years saw me move into sales where my technical background helped me learn new technologies as they were introduced. Over the years I have seen networking go from 10 Mb ethernet on coax to UTP at ever-increasing speeds. Always in sales, I've worked with mostly networking or network security vendors.

Around 2011, I was working in sales for a small company that was trying to develop a custom security appliance. Seeing the need I stepped in to manage the engineering team. After doing some research, I introduced git for revision control, Jenkins for automated software build and test, PXE boot and kickstart files for system builds and a Trac server to manage tickets and milestones. The transition to agile development was in process when the company was acquired. After managing the transition I became a pre-sale engineer for an end-point security solution deployed as VM's on VMWare using puppet. I left that company almost 4 years ago and have not looked for a full-time position since.

While I have been using open-source for years, I'm looking to learn more about how software and systems are deployed these days. It seems the Fedora Infrastructure Apprentice group might be a good place for me to start but I'm open to guidance.

My home lab is two SuperMicro servers running CentOS 7. Both my desktop and laptop are running Fedora 31 with KDE. While I have done some work with both puppet and chef, I have recently been trying to become more proficient with Ansible. I have accounts with AWS, Digital Ocean and Linode.

I look forward to giving back to a project I have been using since before it was called Fedora. Please let me know if you have any questions and I will see you at the meeting tomorrow.

Thanks,

T.C. Williams
IRC: austinpowered