# 2023/11/10

## Decided to add a new section to this repo.
As the title above suggests I decided to add a new section to my repo (Me). 

I plan for this to just be me talking about things that I've done, and just generally sharing my experiences.


## What's been going on the last 2 years?
The last 2 years (as showing my by commits on this repo), has been pretty busy lol. As of 2 years ago, pre Febuary 2022, I was working as a "sales associate" at a company called "Home Outlet". I was selling cabinets and flooring. 

I had, about 4 months before getting the job at Fastwyre (known as "Cameron Communications" when I first started working here), I had enrolled at Full Sail University to get a bachelor's in CS. 

## Why I chose CS over IT
At the time I decided to go for CS rather than IT because, in comparison to CS, IT is simple-ish and you can learn it fairly quickly compared to CS. Yes you can learn CS by yourself, but the 'best practices' are MUCH more difficult to learn by yourself. At least in my experience, you can break something and then learn how NOT to do something more than learning how not to do somehing correctly from the beginning. 

## How I got my Job with Fastwyre

I got my job because I applied to a job titled "CO Tech" as it sounded "kinda" IT-ish from the job description (I was desperate at the time). The job I applied to was far from it, but my application (after being looked at by my soon-to-be manager) was recieved hopefully. I was even brought in to interview for a COMPLETELY different position (Circuit Provisioner), in hopes he could promote me to a position I could fill in well (because I was "technical" in his word).

The simple fact I had a good background in Software and DB's, helped me get the job I am in now. I, honestly, was just lucky. While I am appreciative of being given the start I've been given, I don't think "everything" has been given to me, as I've had to basically learn everything myself. Many of the systems I've worked with (quite a few legacy Unix & Linux system). Many of which went EOL in ~2010 and before, meaning most of the software that we would use to admin or automate admin of our systems (Ansible or Puppet) just don't function because the dependencies just aren't there.

## My Companies Infrastructure
Without going into detail, most of our systems are YEARS out of date. Most of them being RHEL 4 & RedHat 6 or older. Just about all of our systems are OLD and mostly DIY (with the industry and corperate direction of not spending more money than needed). Many of the core workflows being 10+ years old shell scripts running on a system that went EOL in 2014. 

Most of our internal systems only being held together by spit and dirt. I've had to learn most of the OLD methods of admin-ing, alongside having to find out how scripts were made in the "old times". Most of the shell scripts I've had to re-enginner. I've had to completely re-implement many of the things developed by my predecessor, because he designed them to be more manual than needed. In most of my "re-engineering" of solutions, I've had to reimplement things to be comprehensive. Basically meaning that I've had to rework the workflows that my predecessor put together to encompase both the present and past. Most of the things I've had to rework were designed to only work in the present (designed to work as if there was never a chance for his system to fail). Most of the things I've had to rework were due to updates to other systems As often in our industry, updates to other systems often break compatiblity with current workflows/applications. This has happend far too often, as I've had gotten the calls & emails that something failed to function (within 1-2 weeks after a update to as system that seemingly had no implications with). 
