Quote:
Originally Posted by abisson
I need to finally ask you this. I am in Software Engineering right now, so yes I know a lot about computers, and I have been reading your replies for a while now. You clearly are a competent and intelligent guy who knows what you are talking about. Finally, someone who brings argument and proofs to its affirmations, unlike others saying:
"MAC IS FOR ****, W7 FTWWWWWW".
What is your undergrad and current job?
BTW, you totally sound like a guy who would use Arch (Most competent computer users have seen use Arch, so its a compliment btw  ) |
I never went to college. I went into the Marine Corps after HS as a ELINT Analyst (2631). The systems we used at the time were old SPARCstation 1s and SPARCserver 690MPs running SunOS 4. I took to them like a fish in water. After getting out of the Marines, I got a job as the Sysadmin/Network Engineer for a largish ISP that is now out of business. They also used Sun hardware at the time along with a bunch of routers, switches, and portmasters, largely made by Cisco, Ascent/Lucent, and Bay Area Networks. I maintained sendmail for about 80,000 users and BIND for about 500 domains. It was around this time I started getting heavily into programming as well, mostly Korn shell at first, then Python. I'm no longer any good with Python. In fact, I probably suck at Python now as I use Perl and Ruby exclusively for RAD stuff. Perl because it's ubiquitous, and Ruby because I like it better than Perl.
Somewhere along the line I also got pretty good at security and pen testing.
Anyhow, due to time constraints on tuition grants I never used I had to move back to my home state, so I did. I got a job at a fortune 50 company as a Senior Unix Sysadmin at the time. It was also around this time I picked up Perl, and C. I got pretty heavy into system programming as a hobby. Somewhere along the road I also became pretty proficient at C++ and Ruby as well. I seem to also have been nominated to do a lot of the TimeFinder/SRDF work where I work, but that's subsequently been taken over by our SAN architecture team. My biggest strengths at the moment are troubleshooting, performance tuning, capacity planning, programming, security, and configuration management.
My technical title now is Lead Unix Systems Engineer, and I'm currently working primarily on configuration management, cfengine to be exact.
I'm entirely an autodidact I'm afraid, so I can't tell you what classes I took.
As far as books go, I have these on my shelf:
The C Programming Language - K&R
Algorithms in C++ - Sedgewick
TAOCP - Knuth
Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment - Stevens
Unix Network Programming - Stevens
The New Korn Shell Command and Programming Language - Korn
The C++ Programming Language - Stroustrup
Design Patterns - Gang of Four
Compiler Principles and Techniques - The Dragon Book
The Ruby Way - Fulton
Design Patterns in Ruby - Olsen
The Ruby Programming Langage - Matz
TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1 - Stevens
Solaris Internals - Mauro/McDougall[sp?]
and a few more I can't remember. I've read all of them though, Knuth being the toughest to grok. Sedgewick did a good job of making Knuth a bit more accessible though. MMIX is a PITA.