About the Author

Digital Dilemma / digdilem / Flash / Flasheart / Simon Avery

Simon
An old geek from Dartmoor

I’ve been a labourer, tree surgeon, van driver, maintenance worker, fundraiser and managing director of a horse charity.

Currently I’m a Linux Sysadmin happily working for a Sports company in Exeter, England.

I have always been a geek, and fairly recently self-diagnosed as Autistic. This follows an early formal diagnosis of Dyslexia. Re-evaluating my life with this information has led to a lot of “Of course!” moments…

Programming and computer experience

  • 1980s: BASIC, Quill, Adlan, GAC A fun time and the 8-bit Text Adventure scene in Britain at that time was lively and exciting. I sold several games, mostly through WoW Software. (RIP Joan)
  • 1990s: TADS, Borland Turbo-C I ran a BBS for over a decade, and much of my C coding was developing tools for that.
  • 2000s: Perl, PHP, Bootstrap, SQL At this point I was asked to write a database to manage the horses for an equine charity. This evolved into a major CRM that grew with the charity until it was managing close to a thousand horses, 150 staff and all the inter-relationships. This was written entirely in Perl CGI, using MySql as a backend
  • 2010s: Bash, Python, lots more perl and SQL

In the late 90s, I made a major career change and was lucky enough to get a job with a great employer as a Linux Sysadmin. All my adult life I’d lived in awe of these super beings, and suddenly I was one. Imposter syndrome was huge and the learning curve was steep!

  • 2020s: Linux, specialising in EL (Centos, RHEL, Rocky), Debian. MariaDb administration. Uyuni. Grafana. PRTG. Zabbix. Docker and the dozens of other stacks that sysadmins need to know.

Hobbies:

  • DIY, land maintenance.

  • Home Automation, mostly using a very large and completely unnecessary Home Assistant setup.

  • Walking, Cycling, Geocaching Since some heart trouble, this is now less

  • Motorcycling with the occasional easy green lane.

  • Vehicle maintenance and restoring old vehicles.

  • I have a Github page

  • I maintain a number of Dartmoor related websites