I am a 41-year old programmer trying to reinvent himself. I became totally frustrated with M$ products years ago, but I put up with things in order to feed my family. Three years ago, after a brief flirtation with OS/2, I discovered Linux. I have since converted my household PCs to Linux (we don't even dual boot any more). I have longed for the opportunity to alter my career path away from M$ and toward some sort of open source development.

About a month ago, I received a call from a former coworker. His company was looking for someone who could help them begin migrating their application development away from ColdFusion and toward something open source. He asked if I would be interested. HA! I took a pay cut and added 40 minutes to my commute time and I haven't been this happy in years!

I'm actually getting paid to work with Linux (and soon BSD) and do PHP, Perl, and Python programming. My primary task is to build an intranet portal for a particular government project. So far, I'm running MetaDot and WorldPilot. We're also running a Jabber server. Yesterday, I was handed a list of 26 applications they want added to the portal. I hope I can convince them that we may soon need to upgrade the server, although they've been surprised at what I've been able to give them with the P133 w/32MB RAM and 2GB HD they handed me.