Introducing an Aussie!

[brianoz]

Hi all,

As it seems to be the thing around here I should introduce myself.  I'm an Aussie which means I hang around upside down  without realizing it (explains a few things!).

About 18 years ago a white English staffy called Goose walked into a kitchen carrying a green frog and I and my brother ended up starting a small webhosting company in Melbourne Australia with a friendly name inspired by said white dog and frog.  Dreamweaver and HTML were exciting at the time (2004) and  our vision was to try and make simple web tech available and understandable to small business.  Ups and downs, this continued until about 2020 when I decided to call it quits and sold the company to another Melbourne-based host whom I respect greatly.  Learnings and humblings were way too many to list here, but one was that most small businesses don't make it through the first few years, so clientele constantly turns over.  Perhaps the second major learning was that we became a "second host" for many - we got so used to rescuing people, from even local big name hosts, when they had problems.  Another very major and personal learning point was that if you're a hard-core introvert, don't put yourself into an extrovert's job as you'll set yourself up for burnout and becoming a temporary wreck after a while (this is something that I've noticed happens to a lot of host owners over time).  At our peak in Collingwood, we had 7 local staff and 2 overseas developers, and around 2,000 customers-ish.  We had some real luck with our team and enjoyed working as a cohesive and positive place to work (sometimes harder on me than I realized!).

Before becoming a host, my background was Unix sysadmin and I'd spent much of the previous 20 years working for our Fortune 100 companies, starting as a C developer, then technical lead, and ending up as a sysadmin and security trainer.  I worked for one of the big banks, telcos, and  Defence and trained sysadmins as well as doing some project troubleshooting for an enterprise computing group, some of this overlapping my hosting time as well.  I taught coding (C, shell and Perl!) as well as some security and sysadmin topics professionally for a number of staff training groups.

I've always loved programming and am very much enjoying returning to the fold as a coder to try and make some things that hopefully people find useful and cool.  For some weird reason, I quite like PHP (it's fast, easy to host, and quick to code and prototype in), so I've ended up developing WordPress plugins for cinema applications, and now, all going well, a payment gateway for WHMCS.  Perhaps strangely, I find coding quite therapeutic, a little like knitting.

One of my favourite things is travel, which Covid prevented,  but as a hobby, I ended up joining a small group of people running a charity that helps LGBT refugees in Kenya (in Kakuma, one of the world's largest refugee camps).  We help them by providing some food and medical help as well as other types of support, including repatriation and some attempts towards self-sufficiency (difficult in a desert camp).  I'm hoping to provide a little income towards that charity from some of my work projects; I find giving helps keep me both real and grateful for the grace with which I've been provided.  I'm also hugely fond of dogs, and burning new things on the stove.

Anyway, this is probably oversharing, but glad to be around again.  It's really heartening to see some wise old(er) timers around whose usernames I recognize!

Cheers all!

Brian

Edited June 6, 2022 by brianoz
translate from Aussie into US English :)

[brianoz]

This is Goose.  His main job was assessing credit risk;  if Goose didn't like someone, they didn't get credit!  He was always right!!  😎

[brianoz]

Our Collingwood premises, circa 2012