I have been a Unix System Administrator and consultant since I was handed the keys to my first system in 1988: a super-mini from Pyramid Technology Corporation. That system was a dual-mode SysV+BSD OS, and offered our users blazing fast performance (in its day) on a variety of home-built apps based on an Oracle RDBMS.

Since those early, heady days, I have managed and maintained systems from Sequent, Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, VMWare and several other smaller and lesser known vendors. I built my first Linux system in about 1995 (Mandrake). I made the switch to SuSE in 2001, and lastly, to Ubuntu in 2007.

In addition to my time as a *nix sysadmin, I have done a fair amount of programming in a variety of languages, including FORTRAN, Pascal, Cray Assembly Language (CAL), C, C++, Perl, and Java. For the last ten years or so, I have split my time between sysadmin and enterprise Java programming.

I believe that the explosion of the Open Source movement will change the way that all computer users operate. This movement will wrest control of the software options available to all users from a small group of profit-driven enterprises with their own selfish motives governing their moves and instead, allow all programmers with a good idea (as judged by their peers!) to contribute in their own unique and passionate way.