What have I been doing lately? Well, a few weeks ago I went to Linux Fest Northwest. This got me thinking on my "plan 'B'" career. So, I got looking for a college where I could study 100% online. And this college would have to be accredited and honored by my current employer. And finally, I am anticipating the release of Fedora 19.
Linux Fest Northwest is an annual event held in Bellingham, Washington at Bellingham Technical College. This is a place where Open Source people converge, once a year, to
show their stuff, give tutorials, promote new things and have a great
time. Leading Linux Distributions were there as well as groups from many bleeding edge Open Source Projects. Being an "End User" I simply kept my hands in my pockets, maintained a smart and geeky appearance (so I would not be discovered), attended a few lectures and pushed my way through the maze of displays. It was all way over my head but not out of the reach of this white boy because he knows how to jump.
I was challenged to reach for greater heights in my career path and began pursuing a "plan B" career. I have been a laborer all my life and really have a desire to settle down to a low impact job that can provide for my needs. In my research I discovered that an entry level tech job will start at around 40K which is about 10K more than I started in my current job. Depending upon experience and education, a tech job could pay in the upper 5 figures and possibly 6 figures. Again, that all depends on experience and education and ability.
I started searching for a college where I could attend 100% over the internet. I knew about Phoenix University for some time, but it was always way out of my price range. Well, the company I work has a partnership with the afore mentioned institute of higher learning. This means, my company will help thwart a high percentage of my potential education expenses.
In the Open Source arena, when a person stops dreaming, he must be dead. Knowing this, I will continue using Linux and reaching higher every day. Fedora helps me do just that. I can do simple day-to-day tasks with Fedora or I can study programming languages and actually begin to write my own code. Everything I need is built into the Fedora packaging. I rarely have to go outside of the repositories for extra software. But if I do, not too awful difficult to add the extra software to my system.
As far as trends go, Open Source is continuously evolving. I'm glad to at least be able to tinker with it.
