Details about yourself, your background
Hi there everyone. 28 y/o Male, from North Carolina, relocated to Atlanta-Metro area for work. I am currently pursuing a BSBA in Business Admin. and working full-time as a licensed property & casualty insurance sales/serviceperson.
No computer science, engineering, or programming background – but I do like cool tech. and I’m fairly computer savvy.
The skills you want to develop (or have developed)
Interested in crossing-over to IT, I feel inclined to data science/analytics. I would love to grow and become a competent admin. However, I’m unsure about the extent of GNU/Linux use within my current company (American Family Insurance).
I’m actively Studying for CompTIA Linux +, LPIC 1/2 & RHCSA, excited to take on the new challenge and hopeful about what sort of opportunities it will qualify for me to step-into and experience.
Career stories, favorite Red Hat courses
So far haven’t enrolled for any paid courses. I’ve completed through the CompTIA Linux+ XK0-004/XK0-005 textbook & practice exam workbooks.
I scored a copy of RHCSA RHEL 9 study guide (8th ed.) by M. Jang & A. Orsaria. I’ve started to work through a RHCSA 8 practice exam 1 & 2 by Sander van Vugt to get some repetitions with completing those types of tasks and have an idea of how long I am versus how long I should be taking.
I planned to subscribe for RH Learning and dive-into the Red-Hat specific courses after CompTIA Linux+ & LPIC; because it seems (or at least I perceive) that the RHCSA is more difficult and of course mostly specific to RHEL.
Fun facts and anything else you may want to share with your fellow RHLC community members
Current daily driver(s) (Fedora 42, XFCE on Bee Link SER5 & Dell Latitude E7450)
+ Testing (NixOS 25.05 on Lenovo IdeaPad)
My introduction to Linux was on Endeavour OS +/- Nov. 2023. I really do appreciate their community and even preferred their terminal-centric approach; I was warmly welcomed and assisted - however, due to my own “skill issue” it didn’t take long to break my GRUB.
Nothing that was Debian based (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) would successfully install on my strange Lenovo IdeaPad (that I now use as a “server”) so I promptly migrated over to Fedora before that Christmas and it’s been home since.
Fedora has been a great bed to learn & tinker, I started getting to know BaSh, making VM’s, playing around with docker, and just digging down the rabbit-hole altogether - jumping into learning Python, MariaDB, etc.
Fedora has been a great balancing point between “bleeding edge” and “stability”. I’ve grown very comfortable with it. I have -zero- problems getting work done day-to-day, with school (outside of when Windows environment required for monitored exams), or playing games, art/photo editing, hobbyist music/video production etc.
I started with the flagship GNOME but didn’t love the design choices; and didn’t really want the additional dependencies of KDE so I chose the XFCE spin. I’ve gradually started to experiment with Tiling Window Managers (Qtile) but have recently also been very curious about Wayfire and playing around with Nix / Nix OS.
Linux/FOSS community really changed my views about personal-computing and totally made me more aware of analyzing and exercising more choices in a variety of ways. I’ve already started advocating for FOSS alternatives to family/friends. I appreciate the plethora of knowledge, and downright goodwill that everyone shares with one another. I hope that I will grow to be more useful and find ways to contribute - Thanks to all you developers, staff, users who report issues, etc.!
