How a Bash Script Saved My Life
Tags: career, bash, motivation
Published: 2020-01-16 08:25:12

I just want to reiterate how I think Centmin Mod is awesome. I was working in a factory from 2015 to 2016 making $14/hr in their lab testing samples of the product. I would test on average 90 or so samples in my 8-hour shift. So as you can maybe comprehend that work is very monotonous and after awhile I found it to be a bit well maybe even quite a bit soul-crushing. Another tidbit is this factory does not have air condition. Add in the fact that they're boiling product in a bunch of 3600 lb and 7200 lb kettles at roughly 200 degrees F. Compound that with my geographic location San Antonio, TX and you start to realize in the summer the average temperature in my lab was roughly 100 degrees F.

I have a B.S. degree in Chemistry and during the five years I was at University I worked full time in a Computational/Theoretical Biochemistry/Biophysics laboratory running ab initio quantum density functional theory calculations and Carr-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics simulations with transition path sampling on high-performance clusters aka supercomputers. I studied peptides and disaccharides.

I had access to Ranger and Lonestar at Texas Advanced Computing Center as well as Kraken at Oak Ridge National Labs. These are/were really cool machines. I was fascinated with them. It was arguably the most enjoyable period I have had in my entire life actually. These machines run primarily Scientific Linux which is a distribution derived from Enterprise Linux.

I walked out of the factory one day abandoning my shift and when they called me asking if I was coming back I scoffed. So next thing is that I'm unemployed and a little bored living off savings and I have a background in audio engineering so I decided hey let's record some podcasts and build a few sites around those podcasts.

So there fall of 2016 I build my first website using WordPress and the Divi theme. It is running on shared GoDaddy hosting! Halfway into it, I say screw GoDaddy this is horrible hosting service and end up looking for alternatives to Cpanel. I'm also looking for a way to get far away from shared hosting but the VPS prices I'm looking at are a bit steep. I start doing research and I come across the page speed module for Nginx but there is no really easy way to install it. After the experience with GoDaddy and their shared Apache server-based junk crap panel I am dead set on Nginx over Apache. I'm also looking to use CentOS due to my familiarity with Scientific Linux. That rules out easy engine.

Eureka! I stumble upon Centmin Mod! This saves me. Not overnight mind you but it definitely saves me. I found an obscure host in Bulgaria offering VPS hosting for $3/month and their infrastructure is running on Intel Nocona Architecture. So around the beginning of 2017, I have about five WordPress sites running on this bargain basement host for $3/month. I'm feeling pretty well chuffed at this point. But that year sucked. My father died early that year on January 6, 2017. I lost his house. I ended up living in my car for a little over five months from November 2017 to March 2018. It wasn't so bad. I had my phone, my unlimited hotspot, my laptop, and Centmin Mod.

March 2018 to July 2018 I take a 10 week JavaScript Application Development Course followed by a DevOps CI/CD course at a technical school in San Antonio, Texas. I scored a job with a Consulting and Professional Services firm in San Jose, California (the capital of Silicon Valley) as a DevOps Engineering Consultant. So hey I go from living in my car to earning six figures working in Silicon Valley in less than six months. Maybe that is some sort of record? Who knows? I also got to build the minimum viable product version of Pivotal's PEZ portal client.

Other highlights include becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and getting my first contribution to an open-source software project. That project is GatsbyJS in case you're wondering. I'm a member of the organization. Check out my GitHub if you want but it's fairly unorganized.

I just want to say again that working with Centmin Mod really built my web administration skills at a very rapid pace and allowed me to scrape by a source of income when I was in the direst of straits. It still provides me with income here and there although I have moved away from WordPress for the most part. I can't really express my thanks fully so I hoped by sharing this story it would bring some hope or smiles to at least one person out there.

If you made it this far thank you for your time. It is very much appreciated.