For the ten years that I have been a working professional, I’ve been blessed with a variety of jobs. Everything from photographer to aircraft mechanic. I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up (and still don’t, to a certain degree), but it became obvious after my first few years in the working world that I was meant to work in some capacity making computers do amazing things.

My first “real” job was working as a Linux System Administrator on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I supported a group of developers running RHEL 5 on their workstations writing code that ultimately ran on servers also running RHEL 5. It was amazing! I learned so much during that time using RHEL as my day to day operating system, both on the server and desktop.

It was during that time that I came to love Red Hat, both the product and the company. I was keenly aware that if not for Red Hat, my career in technology would involve managing Windows at scale. I’m fairly certain I would not be in the technology field today if not for Red Hat and RHEL.¹ Windows is that bad.

When I moved on from that job and never got the work at another RHEL shop after that. I used CentOS at all my jobs after that². I missed being a RHEL customer since I truly believed in the world they were creating: a viable way to run your business using open source software. It was nice to be part of that as a customer, but I did my part by at least using Linux and not Windows in all the systems I built.

---

Over the years, the nature of system administration changed dramatically. With the growing popularity and capability of cloud platforms and hypervisors, automation became a necessary tool for survival. I’ve always been an automator — from Photoshop actions to shell scripts, I find myself anything I can in any way I can. I had a respectable collection of shell scripts I’d written over the years but I found them hard to maintain and fiddly. They always required too much adjustment to get working, plus manual tweaks along the way.

I settled on Ansible as my automation tool of choice going forward. I have yet to have one single regret. It’s an amazing tool that, despite all my years using it almost daily, still impresses me with what I can make it do in a much more elegant fashion than my shell scripts of old.

So Ansible became the second formative company whose technology and ideals shaped my career. Another company I admired and respected for the way it was changing the world — in the case of Ansible, through better, powerful, elegant, and maintainable automation.

Much like Red Hat after I left my first job, I didn’t have the privilege of being an Ansible customer. But I did my part to help the world see the power of Ansible by using it to build and manage amazing infrastructure and sharing with others.

---

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce that I now work for Ansible and Red Hat. To say this is surreal is an understatement. Few people are fortunate enough to work for a single company they admire. I get a two in one.

I have joined the Automation Practice at Red Hat helping companies of a size and scale I never imagined improve the management of their infrastructure using Ansible. It is truly a wonderful opportunity and I’m looking forward to getting started.

There is one down side to this job change: I left behind a team of individuals that posses a collective talent I likely will not encounter again for some time, if ever. They challenged me, helped me, humbled me, and ultimately made me better. I will miss them all dearly. This is the first time I can say that. I have a feeling this won’t be the last.