Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Fail2ban is an exceptionally useful tool to add to the great list of suggestions here.
Dawn, congrats on the great article. It's worth noting that professional organizations (accountancy, law, engineering, medicine, etc) that exist to regulate the capabilities of their members can create the sort of exclusion of others that you discuss in your article, by encouraging the definition of tasks that require the involvement or signoff of their members even when the background necessary to effectively carry out those tasks is obviously unrelated to the stated professional requirements.
A personal example: I worked in a forestry consulting firm for many years. I'm a mathematician, not a forester, and more than a few times in my career was I unable to undertake certain kinds of tasks related to optimization, operations research and what not that were clearly mathematical and yet "had to be performed by a professional forester". Looking back on that, did that sort of professional exclusion limit my career? I don't think so; but I have to say, I never ran into the reverse situation, where a forester couldn't do the job and needed a "professional mathematician" to carry it out...