What’s next? What’s been on my mind?

When I started using Ubuntu a while back, it was due to my growing frustration with Vista. This was probably the best move I made for my career because it opened up a lot of avenues for me.

It kept me passionate, I suddenly became interested in Operating Systems. My focus was just on Eye Candy, customization and hacks, productivity. In the process I picked up a lot of skills, intentionally because Ubuntu's ever growing project forces you to be on your toes, by the time I became completely familiar with one version the next creeped up really fast. The Linux community in general keeps all other open source projects close to their core, so by using one distribution, you expand your knowledge on various projects at the same time, that you'll  definitely encounter elsewhere. From my desktop support days, knowing malware bytes was just knowing how to run an exe, in Linux  knowing iptables, open up this whole world of understanding what route packets leave and enter your machine.

From Ubuntu desktop user I also became a sort of sys admin, very unconventional one because it was never the end goal. They were things I thought of and I wanted to accomplish, but for that I needed something, and from one technology to another, I was building some skills toward becoming a system admin.

Fast forward, these days I'm very interested in cloud technologies. Some of this is due to the help of the research I've been involved in, within the past year or so. I've then been fortunate to get exposure to a lot of opensource technologies, especially related to the cloud. My research use cases keep changing, and I keep having to rebuild, or adapt to the new features of products such as Openstack, cloudfoundry. I cannot express what a blessing it is to have a lab where you can build a cloud from scratch, and choose whatever services you'll like to incorporate into it. When talking to most people in the community, they deal with one aspect of the technology and that's it, I get the luck to touch everything, which really matches a lot my personality. I have a lot of interest in many things, and curiosity makes me want to touch everything. But I hear, out there, its sometimes about where you are a pro and not how many things you have touched, so until something else steals my interest, I'm talking networks, cloud, sys admin, things by the way, I never got thought a single skill in school.

Cloud got me thinking about the concept of a personal cloud. Every individual in some way, having access to all they need through different providers. Just like the facebook apps, you may be a fan of Rdio, Pandora, Soundcloud, maybe all, or none, same with your pictures, your social networks, same with your backups or any service you could think of that does retain your data online etc. You upload files everywhere, you access each service individually,but what about your data being spread everywhere? What about an API that all those services require to use, that gives you in retrospective access to your own liberated data everywhere. Even if its not liberated, what about a place to keep track of your presence online, what about your personal cloud. I know the backlash could be severe, maybe its not appropriate that your madden subscription, or personal blog, can get linked to any professional profile. What if its secure enough? What about your own files, we pay for internet on our phones, at home, yet, we still have to do things like upload to a service before our music is available, we still have to remote connect somewhere to use the resources we need, what about personal cloud?  what about metrics, bills, like a platform every provider can focus on delivering a service, but personal cloud takes care, of delivering it. Think of mint, but mind for everything, what about cloud as a service? 

I have also become glowingly interested in programming, at web application level, especially if tied to the cloud. PHP is the go to language but my eyes are set on NodeJs, Spring framework and Ruby. Just to name a few. I've come to the understanding that one of the most important things in this generation will be what is done with the information we can collect or how quickly but meaningful information could be portrayed. This vision brought me to an obsession with Hadoop and Mongo DB. Having so little experience in relational databases, NoSQL seem to make sense, and, i'm instead learning in reverse, to understand why its such an improvement.

I keep a very close eye on wearable technologies. I'm getting intrigued by the coming forth of google glass project, or all these augmented reality addons that enables people to be proactively locations aware.

Among the few skills, the most important was, getting comfortable with the command line, apis, and documentation. I went from googling every single instructions to being able to come up with solutions for myself. The second is, it gave me a better global understanding of OS Architecture, although I'm a little disappointed I didn't dive more into C coding, and plugins making, maybe i'll have room to catch upon it in the near future.

I always wanted a Tech Blog, where I could really talk about anything tech related, but I'm passionate about a lot of things and it was hard to find structure and put relevant posts. Months ago I wanted to blog about Apple's gains vs Samsung in the trial and the patent system in the US.

Well since I've given up on doing rants, on my personal twitter about how disappointing Arsenal, has been, and since I have deactivated my facebook, well, it leaves me with two or three hours a day, two or three hours to blog? Well what's next is more? More is everything.

Cheers!