About a year ago, I started working for a new company. This was a major shift for me as I'd gone from being a fully-remote penetration tester with a focus on Windows to an on-site systems engineer with a focus on Linux. This post is some of my thoughts on the change, and things I've learned about my work and myself in that time.

• I really enjoy being a Linux admin more than a Windows admin. I prefer the tooling and being able to do most of my work over SSH.
• I need to have some kind of project tracking like a kanban board so that I don't get lost in a list of 700 tasks.
• I can learn a lot through hands-on work and troubleshooting. I already kind of knew this one but not how much I could learn. A year ago, I had never heard of Satellite and Ansible was something I used in a class one time. Today, I'm the SME for Satellite at the company and leading our Ansible Automation Platform deployment project.
• Red Hat has wonderful people working for them. Everyone I've met on sales calls, in workshops, and at the Summit has been a pleasure to talk to.
• It is so much fun having Linux nerds to talk to who aren't developers. That's not a jab against developers, but there is a difference between a Linux nerd who mostly talks about programming new drivers and a Linux nerd who knows how to write Systemd unit files.
• I loathe driving into an office. I had an hour-long commute each way for most of the past year. It was a huge waste of time, energy, and (gas) money.
• I also strongly dislike being in an office. I never felt unsafe or anything, but I never felt comfortable either.
• Basic vim usage is worth it to learn. I originally did so because nano wasn't available on all of the servers I was managing. I continue to use it as my default because it feels a little more ergonomic than the alternatives.
• Ansible is incredibly satisfying. There's nothing quite like going from base installation to a working service in 2 minutes with one command.
• There are plenty of tricks and tools that I have no idea about yet but will change the way I work as soon as I learn them. For example:
  • bash's Ctrl-r to do a substring search on history instead of tapping the up key a bunch
  • at to schedule one-off commands
  • Everything related to Ansible

I may add to this post as I think of more.