What were you doing 20 years ago?

I lost my old calendar data quite a while back, so cannot go back to see exactly where I was but probably messing with BIG-IP 4.X/3.X.  We were still talking about how BIG-IP had a small role in a big-budget movie a couple of years back.....

In 2003 I had finished high school and then took a year off before heading to college for Computer Systems. At the same time I had been deep diving Gentoo Linux and fooling around with various webhosting projects and PHP coding.

Phew 2003 is many many moons ago!

It was three years before my first contact with F5. Back then my world view was only firewalls, mail gateways and anti-virus. My world was just so small 😆

20 years ago I was .. just quitting a full time job to work for myself for a couple of years; which was not a particularly successful (financially!) period but it directly led to me joining F5 in 2005 and allowed me to broaden my skillset and learn what it's like to work without a safety net..

What I am always surprised by (I don't know why, considering I'm still here?) is that 2/3rds of the people who interviewed me back in 2005 are still with F5 today!

You'd have to look back 30 years to find me still at school..

In 2003 I had recently dropped out of going after a Science degree and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I found a Network Specialist program and enrolled in it that fall. The first of many steps that shaped my career.

20 years back, I've just got based my primary school 😅 a key highlight happened a year before that time @ 2002 which was watching WorldCup 2002 amazing memories 😄 , at that time I used to work on Pascal DOS system at that time.

20 years ago I was helping to build up and expand the MVP Program at Microsoft during the week, and hosting Halo lan parties in my basement on the weekends.

20 years ago, I was a full-time university student with 2 part-time jobs. I was an RA for my dorm at the University of Texas at Austin, and also worked as a hostess at a local restaurant. My roommate and I decorated one of our dorm room walls by completely covering the thing with those free AOL CDs we kept getting in the mail. Blade II had come out the previous year, and basically played on repeat in the common room. 

I spent that summer doing an opera performance program in Salzburg (I was the Dritte Dame in Mozert's Die Zauberflöte), during the hottest, deadliest heat wave Europe had seen in 500 years. We'd take breaks to go to a local grocery store just to stand in the refridgerated section to cool off! 

20 years ago - I was drinking juice and eating a lot of candies 🍫🍬  😂

If only 20 years ago I was in high school, but I had graduated college.. was an internet systems administrator working 80 hour weeks trying to prove myself in the sysops / secops landscape. It was right around this time I developed my first botnet for legitimate use. It was the sanest method to scale our sysadmin functions globally, going from 13,000 employees to 3,000 employees in a 2 week span.