Quoting Zayd (2021-08-06 00:30:58) > How did you basically start learning or was it just a process of trial > and error? I did not attend any formal school or training courses, if that's what you mean. If you mean what drove me, then I have always felt that computers lacked meaning unless they had some practical use in the real world. I mean, playing computer games as a kid was fun but didn't _produce_ anything. And working as an intern at an advertising agency for a year, where my job was basically to put out fires all the time, similarly wasn't fullfilling for me (despite the huge payment I got). I wanted my work to stick - which lead me to work on education-related tools and semantic web tools, and lead me to Debian and to maintaining packages for Debian. If you mean which concrete types of work I did at the beginning when my skills were far lower than my passion, then (as I wrote briefly in previous post) I did lots and lots of unpaid volunteer work. For about 5 years I mainly (from the top of my head) did...: Proof-reading texts, photo refining, and desktop publishing for family and friends. Installing and tuning desktop systems for family and friends, and consulting in best practices of doing backup and which tools to use for which tasks. Later doing same for a small fee for friends-of-friends and then strangers: My first source of income when I started my company. Maintaining workstations, servers, and networking for a small non-governmental organisation. Later doing same for small businesses, charging a monthly fee for that (crucially *not* charging by the hour, to shift attention from fighting fires to getting ahead of them): This became my main source of income for 20 years. Packaging .deb packages for stuff needed for above tasks but missing in Debian - unofficially at first, until someone in Debian stumbled upon my work online and encouraged me to join. This work continued as mostly¹ volunteer work for 20 years, but made my paid work much much easier and therefore (due to the subscription-based approach) more economic. The past few years I am directly paid by Purism to maintain packages officially in Debian. [ in reply to questions asked privately... ] I don't know any "real" programming language like C or C++ or Rust. My scripting language of choice is Perl, and I also grok shell and make (yes, that's a language). For other languages I can juggle patches, needed for the (far too many²) packages I maintain in Debian. I live in Denmark, where monthly income is DKK 30.000 for a garbage man and DKK 25.861 for a taxi driver, according to some³ sources: https://www.dekra.dk/blog/lastbil/hvad-tjener-en-skraldemand https://www.dekra.dk/blog/taxa/hvad-tjener-en-taxachauffoer My accounting is at https://source.jones.dk/ledger/tree/data with usage notes at https://source.redpill.dk/accounting/tree/USE.md - Jonas ¹ with rare exceptions, e.g. Canonical paying for speeding up the packaging of a major new release of MoinMoin when Ubuntu started, and a cryptocoin developer paying (in that obscure coin which later gained significant value) for packaging a wallet for their coin. ² please get in touch if you want to help maintain some of them: https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?email1=dr@jones.dk ³ When I tried to locate some sources written in english for this email, I learned that numbers vary wildly. -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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