"How to sum-up your life experiences in 500 words or less"

That would be a great book, right? OK... maybe not. But it would help, here!

Most of life as a developer (especially the early years) has been concentrated on solving business problems encountered while "paying the bills" . Lots of "why doesn't Excel do this?" and "why can't the computer do that for me?".

As expected, this kind of path has wandered through many patches of muck and mire. I have learned many languages, worked with many types of systems, and fought through many frameworks along the way. Finally on a "happy" path, I've now been doing devops and full-stack application development since 2013. Happily gone are the days of arguing with .Net or full-on hand-to-hand combat with Java to build and deploy installed applications (TFG!).

I'll avoid the jargon-n-buzzword soup that so many dine on these days, but I will say that I can finally call myself "senior" in several categories (sysadm and developer), "extremely proficient" in a few others (virtualization, containerization, config management), and well-versed in so many areas that nothing really scares me anymore (except batch scripting... icky!).