About me

My name is Jeffrey Angell. I'm currently a student at BYU (United States) studying Computer Science. I've taken classes in several imperative languages (and am currently taking some in more), but my real experience lies in personal projects and work experience.

I'm currently working as a quality engineer writing automation testing (among other things), and have previously worked as a web developer (full stack).

I've used a variety of technologies over the years. I started with Flash programming (Actionscript 2.0), then worked with Java, PHP, C++, C#, Python, C, Assembly, Ruby, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (including JQuery and AngularJS), with some exposure to a variety of others that I will not list (it would be a long list). I've also worked with database technologies (mostly SQL RDBMS, but some NoSQL as well). You might think that this would pad my resume, but as I started preparing my resume for possible career fairs this semester, I realized that people are more interested in the techniques that I've learned. For the most part, I've done web work (because of a fascination with the idea of networking), and have since moved on to all types of distributed systems (I've worked somewhat with Java's rmi, for example). I don't do graphics design well, but given designs I can develop the product.

My OS history started with MS-DOS, then moved with Microsoft through Windows 95, 98, XP (skipped ME, of course), then Vista. I first heard about Linux during the XP era (my high school years). I had a friend who used it extensively. At the time, I didn't look into it too much, but when I started college (and had my own computer), I started working with Ubuntu (as it was what everyone I knew used). I used both Windows and Ubuntu off and on for a couple of years (dual-booting, vms are too slow for me), but in 2013 (or late 2012) I decided that I had had enough of Windows, and switched over completely to Ubuntu. By this time I had used Fedora as well, but it didn't appeal to me. After a few months of using Ubuntu, it started to bug me. I know people will be opinionated on this topic, so I'll explain some of my reasons. I started getting error reports every 5 to 10 minutes, saying that something went wrong, but it wouldn't tell me what. Arguably, at the time I didn't know enough about Linux to really figure out what was going on, but the error was really annoying. I also didn't enjoy the user interface. But, because I had been using Debian based systems for a while (I had experimented with a couple of distros, including Debian itself, from the family), I was somewhat experienced with those commands in the terminal. As a result, I switched to Linux Mint. I used mint for another few months, and found that I really liked the user interface (Cinnamon desktop environment), but as I started understanding more about Linux in general, I came to feel that Linux wasn't quite doing everything I wanted. It was then that, on the suggestion of a coworker, I decided to try out Arch Linux. I like (and agree with) the goals and ideology of Arch, and the community is great, but one day I'll have to tell the story of my installing Arch for the first time. Since then, I've done it on more than ten systems and become much more familiar with it. About a week ago I installed Enlightenment as my desktop environment, and it's been good so far.

I do have experience with other distributions as well. At work I use OpenSUSE 13.1 with KDE4. It works okay, but it's not my preferred distro.

In my next post I will address my current ideas about various topics (including why I don't use Windows or Mac OS X). This one was just getting too long.