I’m a freelance IT-Security Consultant. This position I am in just sort of happened, a lot like my relation to the BSD community. I will try to remain brief while not skipping the important parts.
I had access to the first computer at home when I was around seven: a 286 with 640K of RAM, running MS-DOS and Windows. By then it was mostly about video games for me, but I was also into figuring out how the system worked, from hexadecimal editors to productivity suites.
I did not have regular Internet access until around 1998 though, when I was also introduced to Linux by a friend in high school. I got hooked by Open Source, gave FreeBSD and OpenBSD a try but held onto Debian. Never fully satisfied by major distributions, I first tried to fork Debian in 2001, with a graphical install CD, before basing this new distribution on Linux From Scratch.
I gradually gave up gaming in favour of programming at the same time. I figured that I would learn more by reimplementing the wheel than by packaging software, and started an Operating System project called DeforaOS. A lot of this work got me interested in security and into this community, eventually landing a job there.
This is also when I was introduced to NetBSD during a Systems Administration class in 2004. We were in groups of four, with three computers per group. The assignment was to network a Windows client with a server and another client, enterprise-grade with shared authentication and roaming profiles. Our group was strong and the teacher wanted to make our life harder by forcing us to use NetBSD as the second client.
I got instantly hooked by NetBSD instead. I re-oriented my Operating System project around NetBSD’s kernel, and migrated all my systems to this platform. This included unusual hardware like an Ultra 60 that I used as my main desktop until 2009, or tablets like the Zaurus or Nokia N900 for instance. I keep working on my dream smartphone since then, which would of course run NetBSD.
Finally, I became a member of the NetBSD Foundation in 2012. I am even serving on the Board of Directors since 2017. So what was meant to be a handicap on a school assignment got me pretty far into the project!
You can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, and GitHub.
Maintained by
Mischa Peters and
Roman Zolotarev
Hosted by OpenBSD Amsterdam
Sponsored by netzkommune