As probably most of you don’t know, my father was a sysadmin. Actually, I just don’t know if I have recollected these events here before, but in any case, dad was a Database Admin (or DBA), and not so many time was I to find him working (or in my kid’s thoughts: doing “something”) on the computer with a black screen in front of him, and little scribbles which I could not fathom what they were (I learned literacy a little bit older, around 7 yo). So, you can guess my little self had the faintest idea of whatever the hell any of that meant.
Fastforward a few years, actually, a couple decades, and there was I tinkering with linux and the like. Actually, my very first experience with a full-blown linux was on the very notebook that I am typing these words right now, a 2016-ish Chromebook which I had “jailbroken” out of chrome in 2017 or so, but didn’t really start breaking filesystems and looking to fix bugs or entering dependency hell in GalliumOS until 2019 or so.
I actually did experiment with Mint back in 2013, but then, as a teenager still, I was more interested in gaming on the old XPS with a GT425M on it, instead of sailing the ships of Linux experience. After I graduated the urge to play decreased and I became increasingly frustrated with frequent blue-screens of death on the Win 10 that I had at the time, that I finally decided to abandon it, and sell the notebook that I had during that time so I could pay some bills, and I was left with the Chromebook for good during the 2020’s.
My father kept telling me “you will still work in IT someday, you’ll see…”, now I do work with it, and the main memory that I take from it is, by far, one day that I was playing some games on an old Pentium II probably, that he used for work, and the game crashed, but the audio got stuck on a loop. Well, young me had never exerienced anything like that and suddenly thought the computer to be possessed or something. Soon I asked dad to take a look into it and low and behold, he fired up that infamous black screen with scribbles, typed a few cryptic words (I guess) and suddenly the sound vanished.
That, ladies and gentlement, was the first seed that I remember, that planted the curiosity on knowing what lies behind the thingy that you type and play games or access the internet.
So, then, to some extent, I guess that such experiences that I had, the curiosity that grew steady with new day that I saw my father on the computer and doing “sutff”, maybe, gradually compounded until those days of the Chromebook and trying to open a shell outside of ChromeOS. In some ways, I like to believe that such things and experiences are, kind of, the inheritances that I’ve got from my old pal.
Experiences that, to a certain degree, certainly shaped the person who I am today, or particularly, with what I choose to work now.
I didn’t expect to acquire such a thing, or even that the tiny seed of curiosity would spour into a full-blown paying job in the future, thanks God, but here we are… I guess we can’t quite predict the kinds of inheritances we are to recieve when we grow up. But I’m glad that I did recieve mine.
Thanks dad.