Getting into tech just...happened. I graduated high school in 1997, a clueless rube in a small city in Gauteng, South Africa. My high school job was working in a small cafe after school and over weekends, which I figured I'd stick with until I figured out what an adult path looked like. Instead, I ended up with an opportunity to do an unpaid internship in the IT department of an engineering firm in another city nearby. And thus, the nightmare began.
During the last twenty-seven years I've spent working in tech, I've had some fun (😈 hacking FreeBSD 6.3 circa early 2000's onto a period Acer laptop, with an Enlightenment desktop!), some misfortunes (damn you, isinteg!), some amazing experiences with some brilliant technology (❤️ you pre-Cisco IronPort!), some nightmare experiences with technology that hadn't quite come of age (👀 OpenStack), cursed the existence of other tech (🔥 Ceph), been bored to tears by other tech (😴 SurfControl), been amused by some languages (🐪 Perl), stumped by others (🤯 C), and have even worked on an AS/400, which was a room sized mainframe that fed output into a gigantic dot matrix printer.
In short, I have seen much, I recall little, the rest I leave to this blog.