Certification and Employment

[DCT Jared]

On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 20:40:30 -0600, Shayne Patton wrote:
>OK, my first real question.  How many of you all have jobs where you
>work w/ Linux/OSS/gnu.  Out of the people that do, do you think having a
>linux cert or 2 is helpful in finding a job working w/ Linux?
>2nd real question.  I really would like to get involved with a volunteer
>project or something where I can get actual "real-world" practice rather
>than just setting stuff up on my LAN in the basement.  Does anyone know
>of any projects around the metro where I could actually help with a
>Linux/OSS project?

Slow down, Shane. One question at a time: :-)

1. Certification:

Certification is nice, but not necessary if you are serious and devoted. 
I personally will never get certified because I don't like what happened to 
doctors and lawyers when their certification process became universal about 
120 years ago. Used to be you could study Blackstone real hard for a few 
years, take the bar exam and become an attorney, like Abraham Lincoln 
did. Now you MUST attend 4 years of ethics-robbing law school before you 
take the bar. I'd like to see Open Source sustain the credibility of certs 
without mandating them. Therefore I work hard to learn as much as I can
about the art of programming without being certified.

2. Local open source projects:

Take a look at ethereal, one of the top-10 best projects in all
open source, which is managed by Gerald Combs. ethereal.com is 
down at the moment so here is Google's cache of their site:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.ethereal.com/

And Hal Duston works on memcheck, memory allocation checker:
http://hald.dnsalias.net/projects/memcheck/

And David Nicol is working on http://www.tipjar.com/ and
http://www.pay2send.com/

And Charles Steinkuehler hosts LEAF: Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall
http://leaf.steinkuehler.net/

And Jason Clinton helped put kcindymedia.org together, and teaches
a Communiversity class on Linux which may be quite useful to you.
http://www.umkc.edu/commu/w2004skills.htm#Computers

And you'll see Hanasaki's name from time to time in the Linux Kernel list
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2004-01/6540.html

And Chris Bier has a linux-heavy links page on his site:
http://www.cymor.com/links.php

As for me, I put together the open source WinLAMP on company time. 
http://www.dctkc.com/winlamp.php

3. Finding a job working with Linux:

I have a job as a proprietary programmer, but recently successfully 
brought in an open source project for our company, through an unusual
chain of circumstances: more details will be posted to KCLUG when
the first alphas are available on sourceforge... in about a week. (RSN)

4. Real world practice on a Linux LAN:

KCLUG often talks about putting together a 
laboratory/cluster/free-email-portal, and it will happen someday, but 
has not yet. David Nicol is a good one to talk with about this, 
among others.

BTW, there are certainly other local projects I am unaware of; these are
just the ones I can remember off the top of my head at the moment.

-Jared