User:Bobcochran

My Name
My name is Robert L. Cochran. I prefer being called Bob. Robert was what my family called me when I got in trouble.

More About Me
I live in Maryland, USA. I started my career in 1981 as a computer programmer trainee for what was then Industrial National Corporation, a fairly large New England Bank. I currently work for the United States Government as an Information Technology Specialist. I managed various projects in COBOL, CICS, and assembly language on IBM mainframes for many years. More recently I've started the process of retraining and changing my career to become a web developer at the enterprise level. I have supervisory experience as a temporary front-line manager. Besides my full-time work for the government I operate a small business named greenbeltcomputer.biz. I repair computers right in the customer's home or office. I am also becoming interested in embedded systems development. I'm very much a beginner in this area and have played with Arduino device programming.

Open Source Background
My work with open source software began a long time ago when I bought a boxed set of Red Hat Linux 6 at a CompUSA store one day. I installed this on a Dell Dimension XPS computer and it worked wonderfully. Then about a week after that first very encouraging installation experience, Red Hat 6.1 or 6.2 came out (I can't remember which it was), and I promptly bought the boxed set and upgraded my 6.0 system. This failed miserably on the first boot -- the system hanged. I put in a support ticket to get installation help from Red Hat, and answered the questions the support specialist asked me, and with more work I fixed the problem. I was pretty proud of myself. Since then I've used almost every Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora release.

I have never done open source development. I'm more of a user at this point than a software developer. I'm active on some of the Fedora lists. I believe that from a developer's point of view, one has to 'pay for admission' to do development on any of today's major operating system platforms. When you look at the different prices of admission and consider the opportunities each platform offers, open source software is definitely the most worthwhile investment to make. That is why I am here, today, as an Fedora Account System member.

Other Interests
At this time my greatest interest is in Fedora's virtualization and web development capabilities. I want to do software development for my own projects within virtual machines. I would like to contribute in some way to the documentation work for this, and perhaps as time goes on, also help with the testing of virtualization software. It depends on whether I can afford additional hardware that has Intel and/or AMD virtualization capabilities.