I consider myself both but I’m progressively leaning more and more professional.

First off, I’m 100% self-taught. I discovered Linux around 2003 and immediately learned, several times, how not to install it and multiple really good ways of destroying data on a hard drive. I have had the open source / Linux bug ever since.

I went to school for CS for about two semesters before I dropped out. I then started off my career in IT of all places, I was a helpdesk IT administrator. About 12 years ago I landed a job where most of my responsibilities revolved around Linux servers and workstations (academic research lab). I started learning more about systems automation and configuration management tools/languages/strategies. This constantly lead me down roads involving reading source code for projects that I used day-to-day when something didn’t go right. This lead to filing bug reports and ultimately making a pull-request here or there to fix my own issues.

Fast forward two jobs and 10 years and I’ve migrated to a role where the majority of my day is writing systems code. Most of it is in Go now but I still maintain a handful of Python/Django applications as well. The majority of the tools I write for work are focused on developer experience, cloud automation and internal CI/CD pipelines. In my personal time, I contribute to a number of open source projects.