My background:
I’m an engineer (M.Sc. and PhD) and long-term Linux user and open-source advocate. Throughout my professional career, starting in 2008 I have mostly programmed (optimized and developed) internal tools needed for various business needs/tasks. I have around 15 years of professional work experience and more than 20 years of experience working with Linux.
In most of the companies I’ve been working for I’ve been allowed to either use Linux as my primary OS (dualboot) or at least run Linux in a virtual machine (VM). I prefer Linux over Windows any day, although I sometimes also use and do programming tasks on Windows using Visual Studio.
Some history, starting back in the 90’s…
My first experience with Linux was back in the 90’s, but Linux was nothing like it is today. Back in those days, hardware driver issues very often ruined the experience, e.g. I remember a lot of struggling with hardware drivers (e.g. Xorg/graphics or sound card). The whole industry was not as mature and evolved as today and Linux was not as accepted as Windows. It took many years before Linux became as accepted and adopted as it it nowadays. To quote former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer:
“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Luckily Microsoft, with the incredibly increase in cloud computing, today has a different opinion. Server hardware manufacturers aren’t also considered serious if they don’t support Linux. As a teenager, with a pc that was too old and after some years became obsolete, I found myself unable to play the games my friends did. This is where I began learning different programming languages, incl. assembly language and machine code.
Some years later, in my start 20s (early 2000s) I began studying to become an engineer because I knew I wanted to do something “computational”. For many years I was very interested in FEM and CFD. Things didn’t completely go that way, but fast-forwarding a few years to the early 2010s I became a PhD-student which is my first fulltime-job where I could use Linux 100% of the time (Linux is generally widely used at universities, in scientific communities etc).
I don’t see myself moving away from Linux-environments in the future
Luckily for me Linux continues to evolve and the concept of applications being based on free and open-source software gives endless challenges. The environment with having free and open source software as an engineer with a science-based background, is addicting for me.
Rapid changing environments and learning new things I was incapable of has since been characteristic for my professional career. I don’t see myself as a person that learn something and do that same thing for the rest of my career – except that working with Linux-based computers is something I’ll probably continue with for the rest of my life. I’ve been hooked on using Linux (or Linux-environments) for way too many years now to let it go…
Programming languages and motivation
When I was an engineering student I learned to use and also mostly did use C, C++, Matlab and Python2. In the beginning of my professional career I used C#/.NET for GUI-programming on Windows. Later mostly Matlab and Python with a bit of C/C++, as a PhD-student. I’m now employed I’m in a company where I for the past approx. >4 years have been using mostly C++, Python and Fortran (for legacy code) – and I do I bit of internal web-server maintenance (mostly simple HTML-code and a bit basic JavaScript).
I’ve never been good at frontend-development, including e.g. PHP and CSS (would like to be familiar with e.g. CSS Grid and Flexbox) but have been recommended to look into SCSS to improve my skills to something above the “basic”-level. Furthermore I’m running some Docker containers and in the future I hope to do something more useful, like deploying meaningful services in a k3s/k8s-environment and write about that. With this website, hopefully I’ll one day experiment with web technologies that are useful for my webpage/blog while I at the same time can learn and become a better programmer. I have a lot of ideas for side-projects, but unfortunately, not enough time – see my posts at https://mfj.one/blog/ if you think what I write about could be useful/inspiring and leave a comment or a message, if you like!