Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

About | Articles | Books | Jobs | News | Tags

Learn something new every year

This was originally posted on blogger here.

As developers, we all make that pledge, don't we? Some of us learn new languages, new frameworks, new APIs, new methodologies. Rarely do we learn a new operating system.
30 years ago I was using whatever they called the operating system on the [Apple ][ series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series) of computers. 20 years ago I learned to use [MS-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS). 17 years ago I added [Windows 3.1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x) to that mix. 15 years ago I ran into [Windows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows) 95 and the subsequent set of 98, 2000, Me, and XP. 10 years ago I started to play with [Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux) and [Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix), mostly learning the simple shell commands needed to shuffle files around. 3 years ago I commenced working on [Mac OS X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X).
During my Windows 98 days I was forced in doing help desk and system administration work. I hated it. The pop-up menus were not intuitive. Documenting what you did was hence agony. I begged my job to make me a pure developer but they forced me to continue down the path of Windows administration. Eventually I left that job and became a pure developer.
Over the years I got better at Unix and Linux. I even set up two servers for production use, one running [Apache](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server) 1.3.x around 2001 and and the other a whole bunch of [JBOSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBOSS) stuff in 2003. Finding documentation was a pain, but the sense of logic compared to the chaos of windows pop-ups was a relief. After that when I would touch Unix or Linux it was basic file management stuff and nothing sophisticated, and my beginner skills never got a chance to grow further.
Flash forward to 2007 and beyond where I did serious [Python](https://python.org/) development for [Plone](https://plone.org/) and then [Django](https://djangoproject.com/) applications. Development was on Mac OS X and production was Linux. My neophyte level skills no longer where quite enough. Our system administrator and other co-workers helped out or did the work but it limited and frustrated me. Nevertheless, the time to really bone up on Linux never happened.
Well, this past week has been a crash course in ramping up my Linux skills. The next version of [SMD Spacebook](https://pydanny.blogspot.com/search/label/spacebook) will be put into production as an [RPM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager). Its been assigned my task to do it. This would involve a lot more in the way of Linux that what I was used to, since I needed to create an environment to run the RPM build commands, and that couldn't be our testing or production environments. That meant a chunk of setup and configuration of a lot of packages, and various proprietary bits and pieces in order to meet government and corporate requirements.
I tried not to bug my co-workers too much except for when their documentation didn't quite explain everything, and then I added to their documentation. I'm still a beginner but I feel like I've finally gotten a chance to spread my wings in this arena a little bit and learn a lot.
This will make it easier for me when I finally get around to getting this blog off [blogger](https://www.blogger.com/) and into what will probably be [Django-Mingus](https://github.com/montylounge/django-mingus).

Tags: django Windows Linux plone python MacOS legacy-blogger
← Back to home