Chris at Schweitzer Mountain Idaho, February 2020

Introduction

I started learning about computer operating systems in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

I ran a series of experiments with a dial-up modem ISP that offered static IPv4 addresses to customers. Since I already had a dedicated phone line for Internet usage, it was a great way to experiment with home based web servers. Eventually I registered a domain name, so I could move away from the numbers in the URL/Address bar.

Some of my first web server experiments were with Windows Server 2000 and FreeBSD. I recall fondly going to a local bookstore around the year 2003 that had a decent selection of technical books, and finding one named FREEBSD UNLEASHED. I ended up buying it eventually, with some of my savings from working low-wage jobs near where I grew up.

Early 2000’s

In 2004 I moved to the Pacific Northwest of North America so I could more fully pursue my dreams of working in technology and skiing every month of the year. Around 2005 - 2006 I also became much more interested in open source software, and increasingly interested in Linux distributions such as Debian and the new upstart fork Ubuntu.

Mid 2000’s

In February 2010 I started doing some consulting work for a startup company that I would soon become a critcal team member of. Revolution Computing was the name at the time, but would soon be renamed to Revolution Analytics. I was brought in by the leadership team primarly because of my experience with Linux distributions. The company was pivoting from desktop oriented data analysis (business model), to a servers in the data-center (business model). However most all the exisiting team was not very experienced with Unix or Linux. They needed a specialist, and I enjoyed this opportunity very much.

I found the people and the work at this company to be a perfect combination of things I was already experienced enough in, but still found challeneging and interesting.

At Revolution Analytics I first discovered the ZFS Filesystem, and would later on deploy it in productions environments on bare-metal in our private data-centers.

Later on I would use ZFS in a cloud environment for the original versions of the system we eventually named MRAN. (The Modern R Archive Network)

2015 - Present Day

In April 2015, Revolution Analytics was aquired by Microsoft Corporation. I decided to pursue other opportunities around this time.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing tools that I adopted early on, Docker containers for example, go on to become defacto industry standards for cross platform testing and deployments.