Early Days

I was born in the days of dial-up. My dad liked to tinker with computers and built a couple of his own. He showed me how to move a jumper on the motherboard so he could set up a floppy disk drive to play Blake Stone. I became a tinkerer then too.

As I grew up, I fiddled with router settings and customized my desktop wallpaper, and wiped my computer a couple times to clean out browser popup viruses. I learned some HTML by writing a never-published Super Smash Bros Brawl character guide for Ness. But I never met a computer programmer until middle school. A member of my church gave me a small book on SQL that I understood and a giant book on PHP that I didn't. I never thought I could become a programmer.

Finding Free Software

That all changed when I was introduced to Ubuntu. My brother had a refurbished computer that he used for school. We couldn't afford to buy another one or another license of Windows. A neighbor told me about Ubuntu, a free operating system, that I could try. I installed it, and it worked! Mostly. At least it could boot. I still had to figure out how to get wireless drivers that worked and figured out how to compile backported drivers and configure wpa_supplicant.

We found so much free software in the software repositories: Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, LilyPond, MuseScore, Battle for Wesnoth. I couldn't believe that all of this was free! I was hooked.

I bought a couple of books on how to make video games, which I read but never did anything with. (They were written with DirectX, and I didn't know enough back then to translate the concepts to things I could use on Linux.) But using Linux made me learn about operating systems, drivers, networking. I learned how to find issues on computer forums, read error messages and other troubleshooting techniques.

An Unexpected Career Path

Heavily inspired by the Pixar movies I grew up watching, I aspired to become a 3D animator. But I never learned to draw. Eventually, I went to college to study music, anticipating opening a non-profit for teaching music lessons to kids like me who couldn't afford them. Injury prevented me from continuing, so I studied other things.

I got an on-campus job in the IT department because of my experience I gained from using and troubleshooting open source software. Eventually, computers became my career. So my livelihood is due to the software that thousands of developers (and some organizations) have written and maintained for free.

Passing it On

These days, the Internet has even more resources for learning things for free: while I was learning to play piano by ear by listening to low-bandwidth audio streams played over staticky speakers, we can now stream high-definition videos of music tutorials and hours-long live coding streams from YouTube. And browsing the Internet is now more secure than ever for normal users. I haven't had to fix a browser popup virus in forever. The Internet is a global resource that is widely accessible that people like me can learn to enrich their lives.

But there's still more work to do. While computers are more secure now, they're not invulnerable—no system will ever be fully secure, especially one so wild as the Internet. I want to work however I can to keep the Internet open and secure so that my kids, and their kids, and you and your neighbors can find have the benefit that I had. And I hope this blog can serve as another stepping stone to knowledge for those after me.