Been a long time since I wrote. August-- right about the time I found out my friend Rob had died a month before I was told about it).
How much has changed for me since then. It all started so innocently with a few Perl scripts I wrote. Then I took an interview with a company who needed a DBA on Oracle running on Solaris. I didn't get the job, but the experience was uplifting. It made me realize that I had been underestimating my skill level. Here I took the interview thinking that I had no chance and I made the top two.
So imagine my surprise when I got an opportunity to work with UDB on AIX at the company I'm currently with. Pretty neat. Apparently, me experience with Linux at home was educational enough that the team-- normally skeptical of anyone trying to cross over into the Unix world-- accepted me no problem. Kewl! So now, after 4 years as an NT DBA, I've made the switch to Unix.
Interestingly enough, someone who is on our LUG's mailing list was saying he felt he should start learning NT first, and then Linux because, "there's more market demand for it." We set him straight on that point. To be fair to the lad, it came out that he was reacting to the MCSE hype. I related to him my story about how difficult it can often be once you have been saddled with Micros~1 certification. People tend to think of you in that light and it's like a trap-- very hard to redefine yourself.
So now he's learning Linux/Unix, which is what he really wanted anyways. He was just worried he wouldn't find his skills useful. I can understand entirely.
So I'm moving to Connecticut this summer. Meanwhile, I'll be splitting my time between locations. My new boss is himself very interested in Linux (as are much of the crew). My company's main interest seems to be more towards using it on our mainframes-- which I wouldn't mind getting into at all.
I'm still more of a Sysadmin than a coder, but many of the tools that are currently lacking in our AIX environment can be created using tools like Perl or other Free/Open software toold. I'll be in a good position to make sure we don't pay too much for our functionality-- and get to play with lots of new software toys along the way.
And I get paid for it too? Kewl!