About Josh Beard
See my now page for a summary of what I’m up to lately.
Personal
I’m from the 80’s. My primary hobby interests are computers and music.
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I live in Colorado with my beautiful wife and kids. Rapid City, South Dakota is our hometown, though I was born in North Eastern Arkansas with roots in that area and the Missouri Bootheel, growing up there until the age of 6. I lived in Derby, Kansas from ages 6-9 before moving to South Dakota. I also lived in Western Missouri between 2000 and 2001. I’ve temporarily lived in a few other places over the years. I have a fondness for all of these places.
If I travel for pleasure, I prefer driving over flying.
If you are looking at this and dig personal websites and that sort of thing, say hello!
Computers
I’ve been a computer hobbyist since I was a kid/teen in the mid-late 90’s, starting with our obsolete family computer bought from a garage sale, the next family computer, and several other outdated computers I collected from people back then.
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I took an interest in Linux and Free and Open Source Software around 1999 and became particuarily interested in setting up and administering servers and websites. I stayed up until dawn many nights learning and experimenting with this stuff and hanging out on IRC.
Around 2003, I started using FreeBSD to experience another UNIX-derived system and ran it for several years on my desktop and home servers, eventually using it for core services at a previous job. Although I don’t use it as much these days, I still love it and have a lot of respect for it and its community.
I owe my career to Free and Open Source Software and the ecosystem built around Linux and UNIX.
See the My Old Computers page
Professional Life
I was doing hobbyist stuff with servers and web apps in virtually all of my free time prior to getting a career doing it. I didn’t go to college; in fact, I dropped out of high school and got a GED. I joined the Army and did some level of IT administration as part of my duties, but not so much traditional systems administration or development. I later worked for Apple doing support and loved any opportunity to use the UNIX/BSD side of their platform.
I got my formal start in systems administration at a school district several years ago, sort of forcing my way into it as an eager young man. At that point, I had already been running common services on Linux and FreeBSD for years for all sorts of things and had some coding experience - at least shell, PHP, and web stuff. In that role, I really honed my coding skills (by sysadmin standards) and gained experience with several types of services, particularly e-mail services, file services, LDAP, and HTTP. There, I learned Puppet, configuration management, version control, and lots of other things, which launched me into a new phase of my career - ‘DevOps’.
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These days, my title is something about “DevOps” and I work on software engineering teams to support and help make software. Some previous titles were Systems Administrator, Systems Engineer, Help Desk, and computer guy.
I spend most of my day in a code editor and shell, bouncing across several projects.
See my resume for more details about my professional experience.
Music
Music has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, I dreamed of being a musician, but pragmatism set in and I ended up pursuing IT. I have several guitars, some little electronic gadgets, and an electronic drum set that I play with.
I listen to a pretty diverse range of music, but rock and electronic are the dominant broad genres. I don’t have a single favorite band - it depends on the mood. Some consistent favorites are Pink Floyd, Type O Negative, Tool, Puscifer, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, The Cure, and… I hate to try to enumerate them all. For electronic music, my favorite is probably Kruder & Dorfmeister. I also like Orbital, Prodigy, Lords Of Acid, LTJ Bukem, and many others. When it comes to country, I particularly like Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and generally classic country. I also like a lot of 80’s and 90’s country. I can’t stand pop country or most modern pop music in general.
Checkout my last.fm profile for my music stats (with lots of gaps) dating back to 2005.
Politics and Culture
Although I occasionally feel the urge to express my opinions on political or social issues, I typically hold back, confining such discussions to my family or closest friends. I was more flippant online 20 years ago, when things seemed a bit less consequential. My stance has increasingly become contrarian against dominant social, cultural, and political issues, trends, and ideologies, which I’ve observed growing more authoritarian and dogmatic in recent years. Concurrently, my own viewpoints have evolved significantly.
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In terms of my political and social alignment, I resonate most with libertarian principles, but it really depends on specific issues. I’m generally skeptical of broad, centralized authority and collectivism. As for government, I’m wary of oppression, actual authoritarianism, and actual totalitarianism. I have a preference for authorities in my life to be as proximate and de-centralized as possible.
Despite living in a society that professes increasing diversity and inclusivity, I find culture becoming more and more superficial, monolithic, and intolerant; less diverse and inclusive in practice. Group think and conformity are rampant.
I believe we’re massively over-governed and that the contemporary obsession with “safety” is overbearing and frustrating when applied to every arbitrary aspect of life, especially in the context of “offensive” speech and expression. I strongly believe in the right to either withhold an opinion or not have one at all. I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working with people from all sorts of backgrounds and wildly different perspectives.
In Memory
🐓 A rooster in memory of my mom.