Science and technology

A curiosity for Linux results in an surprising profession

The first time I noticed Fedora, I used to be 15 or 16 years outdated. Someone I knew was making an attempt (and failing) to put in it on their laptop. I might by no means seen an OS apart from Windows. I used to be intrigued and began asking the particular person many questions. He informed me this OS was free to obtain and set up—and I might even set up it on my laptop—however I didn’t imagine an OS might be “free as in free beer.”

I went residence and began poking round on the web for extra info, however I used to be too nervous to obtain it. The motive? The web in India was not very quick (at the very least not in my residence), and it had an information cap that might have been exhausted by downloading an OS. Yes, I do know it was most likely a gig or much less, however I did concern of utilizing up all my web, so I moved on.

I didn’t imagine an OS might be “free as in free beer.”

Three years later, throughout my sophomore yr in faculty, the college required us to make use of Ubuntu for all of the lab assignments in my Data Structures course. A professor taught us the ABCs of how you can boot up and use Ubuntu, extra particularly gedit and terminal, and my journey with Linux actually began. I put in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop computer and loved utilizing it for my improvement assignments and different duties. But I quickly realized it was not good; for instance, my movies didn’t play in addition to they did on Windows 7. That and another issues drove me away from Linux as my on a regular basis OS, however all my improvement remained on the platform.

Then, certainly one of my buddies dared to interchange Windows with Ubuntu fully, adopting it as his on a regular basis OS. We debated this quite a bit, and I by no means actually accepted his choice. Meanwhile, I attempted Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, and different Linux variants only for enjoyable. I used to be additionally utilizing Ubuntu One to retailer my recordsdata within the cloud previous to Google Drive.

Fast ahead to my senior yr venture: We landed a sponsorship from a startup primarily based in Pune, India, the place we labored underneath their steering on a venture primarily based on OpenStack Horizon. That yr I realized quite a bit concerning the cloud and Python.

By the time I graduated and began my grasp’s program, I had heard of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), primarily as a result of I had seen individuals in Pune sporting Red Hat T-shirts or caps. I realized about Red Hat’s Developer Program, which provided a free, 1-year developer subscription to RHEL. I downloaded it and began utilizing it as a substitute of Ubuntu. Later I utilized for a summer time internship with Red Hat and obtained that job.

At Red Hat, I started attending to know Linux even higher as a result of it’s on the core of who we’re and what we do. You by no means know what your profession path may take, however should you pursue your pursuits and are curious, chances are high it’ll result in a satisfying job.

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