What I'm not

Unless I explicitly state otherwise below, you must assume I have no expertise / formal training in any topic. This includes, but is not limited to, assuming I have any legal, medical, or structural engineering, electrician, or plumber training whatsoever. I have no such training, nor do I hold any certificates or accolades in the aforementioned.

If you take my advice and it ends badly, you do so at your own risk and I can provide no warranty or guarantee as to my advice's efficacy, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose.

My advice is provided "as is". If you take my advice and it ends well, I am "happy for you", unless you are using the advice I have given to "be a dick", in which case I am at best "ambivalent". I do not understand why licenses feel the need to put "as is" in quotes, but I like punctuation (especially parentheticals and ellipses...), so I've decided to "adopt" that "arbitrary style" for the "duration" o"f" "this paragraph".

What I am

I'm a computer engineer and computer scientist (with degrees 'n' everfin'). I wouldn't call myself an "expert" in any topic, but I like computers and am reasonably good at getting thinking machines to do what I want them to do. Currently working as an SRE at $silicon_valley_company writing Ansible and Salt deployments targeting cloud infrastructure.

Personal opinion? After writing a lot of Ansible, I've reached the conclusion that no one should use Ansible. I've yet to come to a formal opinion about Salt.

Languages

My favorite languages are bash, C, C++, Python, Verilog, Perl, and Haskell, but of those I'm only fluent in the first 6. I'm also fluent in Matlab (well... GNU Octave, really), Java and VHDL. And I like Scala better than vanilla Java- except when it comes to the collections framework- because mixins.

LaTeX is also fun, and I can use it wonderfully, but ``fluent'' implies I know a lot about the language constructs, which I don't, so I'm not.

Platforms

If it's an operating system whose name is a registered Bell of AT&T trademark Corporation, or based on the aforementioned, I like it. Also like FreeBSD a lot (ran it on my main machine without a GUI for the duration of 2014). But I also quite like OSX. I know how to use Windows effectively, but that O/S is just too GUI-oriented to make me happy. And, no, Powershell doesn't solve the problem. If I wanted to write DCL, I'd be running VMS.

CentOS and Debian also float my dirigible quite nicely.