John Whipp Email & Phone Number

I am passionate about Linux and Unix and how they have become the backbone of the world's communication infrastructure. I was first really introduced to Linux as a call center agent at what was then a small Wireless ISP and it opened up the world of Open Source solutions to me which lead to learning how to use the shared knowledge of various Linux/Unix communities.Out of a desire to become more independent and not have to rely on others for problem solving I managed to join the technical team at Jenny Internet as a Wireless Network Technician but I lacked the experience and knowledge of the senior technicians as I had no experience beyond the wireless networking knowledge I had learned there.In order to gather more experience I moved to work at the Hetzner Data Center in Midrand, Johannesburg as a technician. Building hardware, cabling and improving on my basic Linux skills is what I had taken away after a year to give me the proper foundation I needed in terms of hardware and practical skills.I joined ProDev tech as a Junior Linux Engineer excited to learn more about this amazing Operating System that ran the world and my mentor Gideon van Aarde had me install Gentoo as my workstation for my first task. Needless to say it was a struggle initially but it taught me the fundamentals and gave me insight into how the operating system worked. I learned how you could build a business on the back of Linux and Unix as I was introduced to many different solutions and software. Automation through shell scripts were a major influence as a lack of desire to do "boring" laborious tasks was a virtue as you could automate it.The short of it is I have experience but I am not the Nix Wizard I want to be yet and relish the opportunity to learn as much as possible and the great thing about this industry is that the learning never stops.