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Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#81

Post by city41 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #70

I had a very unusual childhood. I learned to read at only 4 years old, which opened so many doors for me. By the time I was 7, I had read the "Black & Decker's Guide to Home Wiring" so many times, I bought some parts at Walmart and built a working electric lamp from the book. (And, to the shock of my family, an electrician later inspected it and said I had done everything correctly and it was completely safe to use.)…

The fundamentals change much more slowly. Like http has hardly changed at all until 2.0 showed up. So you can take that knowledge to Laravel, Rails, Express, whatever. I've always felt digging a little bit and getting down more into the core of things can really help with the fatigue of tech always changing.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#82

Post by spicyramen »

I used to work as a technician for a telephony company. My job consisteted in unpacking phones, connect them and label them. Around 2000, Enterprises started replacing their PBX with VoIP While setting up some of those VoIP telephones I met a guy who was happily setting up things in a black screen in the same server room. He explained me that he was using Asterisk PBX project and how he was setting up VoIP and an analog PBx line just using free software. (Our solution was Mitel wchih was a custom BSD distro) I was able to download it and customize it, this requires learning a lot of Linux commands, eventually completed my degree in CS and move from Latam to Silicon Valley to work in UC research

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#83

Post by buro9 »

fiftyacorn wrote: post #49
buro9 wrote: post #20

It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for the night before sleeping rough nearby. During this I collected names and addresses of their fans so that if the bands got new T-shirts there was the potential to contact the fans and let them know. One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video…

Was Damon Albarn was Justine frishman of elasticas boyfriend at the time? I remember Dave rowntree of blur also wrote some Linux drivers

Yes. And Damon used to come to the Elastica gigs, but because Parklife had suddenly made them mega famous he always had to sneak in the rear doors of venues or climb drain pipes to get into dressing rooms to be with Justine.

Dave did graphic design and 3d work as a hobby but this was much later.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#84

Post by TallGuyShort »

I got started in tech when I found a book about making your own computer games in my elementary school library. It was a little old even then: we had a 486 running DOS 6 and the book was, I would guess, 10 years old. It detailed how to save your work to what appeared to be an audio cassette and I'm quite sure it wasn't written in a DOS-dominated world! I figured out how to use QBasic and I started building things from what I had learned in the book. My Dad (mainframe engineer) and older brothers (who had done it in high school) saw, and started chiming in with tips and help, and showing me new things that weren't in the book. I got Turbo C++ for my 12th birthday, and in high school we finally got the Internet, I discovered forums, and Java and PHP and many others, and the rest is history. I got a job in tech out of high school and paid for college in a few years.

I had tried to get into Linux all through high school but my family was completely unsupportive of that (still are, weirdly). I bought an old machine (wiped) and a book about Mandrake Linux at a garage sale, but I couldn't figure out how to get Linux on there. I had a copy of Fedora on CD, but didn't know enough to get a CD drive working successfully. I tried Linux From Scratch on floppy disks, and the PDF was an interesting read, but I never got that computer very far. When I could afford my own laptop I had a problem within weeks and Microsoft support managed to brick the system remotely. I decided to go all-in. I spent a few weeks trying various free *nixes. Ubuntu was brand new, but it worked well enough to get me to never go back (though I have often explored BSDs and other distros). By my senior year I was working exclusively on back-end Linux stuff. Now I would say I have an exceptionally successful career and I haven't touched a proprietary OS in 9 years!

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#85

Post by J0_k3r »

It was around 2014, and I had just started secondary school (k-7 for primary, 8-12 for secondary) and I had no friends, I decided I wanted to build a computer and I ended up deciding to install linux on it (I had some previous experience running minecraft servers) and from there on out I was in. I never had many friends in secondary school and my mom was always working, and I didn't want to wander around town getting into trouble so I spent my teenage years alone working at the computer learning to sysadmin stuff. I'm in uni now doing a compsci degree so I guess it all worked out right? Still don't know what there is for me in the fog of the future but hopefully when it clears I will bask in the light of the sun.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#86

Post by laurent92 »

city41 wrote: post #81
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #70

I had a very unusual childhood. I learned to read at only 4 years old, which opened so many doors for me. By the time I was 7, I had read the "Black & Decker's Guide to Home Wiring" so many times, I bought some parts at Walmart and built a working electric lamp from the book. (And, to the shock of my family, an electrician later inspected it and said I had done everything correctly and it was completely safe to use.)…

The fundamentals change much more slowly. Like http has hardly changed at all until 2.0 showed up. So you can take that knowledge to Laravel, Rails, Express, whatever. I've always felt digging a little bit and getting down more into the core of things can really help with the fatigue of tech always changing.

Yes but recruiting becomes harder. There is practically no way to recruit a motivated person today for classic Atlassian SDK plugins (jQuery, Velocity/Soy templates, and then classic Java. Spring is handled for you as Atlassian set it up, so not much to learn technically). I’m having the time of my life on these tools, creating plugins that customers around the earth hear about and come to Confluence for, but I can’t expand.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#87

Post by daneel_w »

I was a web developer in 1999. It was my first job after school. The business owner was a diehard Windows enthusiast, but after a streak of problems with our customer-hosting IIS/ASP setup he asked me to "look into Linux, maybe it'll work for us".

We had a set of old unused Mac Quadras in the office that I were allowed to tinker with, and I came upon either Linux-m68k or Slackware for 680x0, cannot recall which. I had never been in direct contact with anything Unix or Unix-like. Despite having programmed computers since the early 1990s, and being very stubborn with getting things to work, my memory of installing and trying to use that Linux distribution was something along the lines of "created by mad scientist, for other mad scientists"; a complete lack of user-friendliness and severely deficient documentation. I gave up.

Some weeks later a friend recommended me OpenBSD. It was a night and day difference. The installation was simple, clear and mostly intuitive, and documentation was top-notch. Within a single day I had both a working desktop environment and an Apache web host environment with Ms Access + ASP capabilities (through something called ChiliASP I think), and account-based FTP access.

I've been using OpenBSD ever since, and just a couple of years later I moved from Windows to Mac OS X as my primary desktop system because of growing so fond of the power and versatility of Unix-like environments.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#88

Post by ronanyeah »

Worked odd jobs and travelled until I was 25. After a year trying stand up comedy I wanted to develop skills that were more 'tangible' and started looking into tech.

I originally intended to learn how to make Android apps but ended up going to a full stack web bootcamp and the rest is history.

Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

#89

Post by smooc »

My mother was a teacher in computer science (called informatics here at the time). She brought the first computer into the house (8088) and even a "laptop" that was over 5 kilos (a sharp with lcd).

What got me into Linux was a little later in 1997. I was playing Quake and I found out that my ping times were 60ms lower over a modem 33k6 connection than with Windows. That got me sold. And I just had a knack for the command line.

During my student time I quickly found out that tech paid my bills a lot easier than working in a cafe. It didn't attract many girls though so I kind of tried to combine it ;-)

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