2009 is nearly over, and I thought I would have a look back on some of the things that have happened in the past ten years that have most affected me.
The first is the proliferation of the Internet into everything I do. In 1999 I was in my second year of Upper School, with no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. The Internet was there, but it was slow and the content was difficult to find. It sparked my curiosity though, and over the next ten years I would research it and play with it, setting up servers of my own to see how they worked, eventually leading to my current position as a website administrator. Part of this learning was sparked by the growth of Google, which in 1999 was new and no-one had really heard of it.
1999 was also about the time that I started creating my own websites, though I wouldn't register muzz.co.uk for another four years. It was hosted in various different places, initially being all hand-typed and later using blogging and CMS software to manage the background elements. Whilst I did not keep the content across all the different versions (which could be both a blessing and a curse) I have always had a site, and tried to put some vaguely useful information on there.
around 2001–2002 I discovered GNU/Linux and Free software. I wasn't initially impressed with it—I could never get X11 to work and it caused me more frustration than anything else, but in my determination to get it working I gained a better understanding of it and came to love the power and the flexibility it offered. As I learned more about it I started to dig into the history of the system, which led to a passion for UNIX in general and the BSD operating systems (namely OpenBSD) in particular.
In 2003 I got my first full-time job as a systems engineer, building high-powered workstations and servers for the animations industry. The experience I had gained from experimenting with GNU/Linux paid off massively here, and I was able to build on it massively as I would now be using it daily on the systems we were building. I learnt to configure web servers and mail servers, understood TCP/IP routing and network design, and was given a lot of challenges that would enhance my understanding of computers and networks.
2006 saw my move from the hardware side of computing to the administration side, when I got a job as a network technician at a local college. It was my first real taste of corporate networking, and I quickly learnt the challenges involved in running a network of 300 people instead of just five. Patching, incremental updates, user account issues and Active Directory were all completely different beasts on a network of this size, and I learnt that even the smallest changes need to be tested and performed with great care, particularly if they needed to be made in the middle of the working day.
2006 was also the year I started dating my future fiancée Emma, getting engaged in the February of 2008. We had a lovely engagement party in the June of that year with both of our families coming together for the first time, and everyone had a brilliant time.
In the summer of 2008 I was promoted to the position of Systems & Web Administrator, which meant I moved from running campus-level projects and hardware to managing systems that would affect every user and campus in the college. This was a big step, and I hit the ground running by taking command of the SharePoint portal, three college-wide public-facing websites and the main internal Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Within a year I would roll out an entirely new VLE to replace the old one, manage the installation of a new web- and mail-filtering system, and assist with the deployment of new learning platforms across every campus and school that we managed. It involved a great deal of planning, preparation and training at every level, and I loved every bit of it.
I wouldn't like to guess what the next ten years will hold for us, because with the current pace of technology I know that I would be completely wrong. There will be new projects that no-one has heard of yet, and existing ones that everyone believes to be unstoppable may be completely forgotten. But I do hope that the next decade is as interesting and as challenging as the previous one, because I have enjoyed it immensely.
