How CentOS changed a 12 year olds life

Imagine you're a seasoned IT professional in Linux architecture over multiple decades and a 12 year old walks up to you at a middle school career-fair: shakes your hand, hands you a personally branded business card, and begins to ask you how to correctly configure a 8TB storage array on a Debian host all while advertising their home audio-visual installation services.

For most that sounds insane, and for me it was. I'm sure my then-future mentor felt that way too although he just responded with "Use CentOS!"

In the middle of my podunk town with only 228 children across 7-12th grades, how was I able to access a Chief Architect from the worlds leading Linux corporation not only answering my questions -- but ultimately altering the course of my life.

The 12 year old me had a dream – I'd be a Red Hat Solutions Architect someday.

Matt answered all of my questions that day and went one step further. My new found mentor had instilled not only the knowledge to complete the project I had at hand but also left a void filled with more questions than when I started. He left me hungry, and seeking for other opportunities.

Over several years I continued to meet with Matt once yearly or so and each time I'd come in to our lunch/dinner meetings with several questions on career, life, varying perspectives, and more. Matt offered a frame of mind from some of the highest and varying viewpoints of the IT field and guided me in developing my own long term vision for the systems that exist for and around technology.

Often times our conversations would pertain to the systems of people around technology equally as much as the systems of technology itself. I can recall in-depth discussions of "Who Moved My Cheese" around much of this topic. We focused on the empathetic qualities of technology at times, how it can serve to connect or divide us, and most memorably the foundations of operating in an open environment.

Fast forward some 13 years later -- I am a Red Hat Solutions Architect.

In just under one year since coming to Red Hat I've been able to accomplish several of my lifelong dreams:

I've spent the past year traveling to Austin, Dallas, Philly, New Jersey, Denver, DC, Virginia, Laramie (Go Cowboys!), Iowa, NYC, Boston, and soon Bismarck and Salt Lake City, helping people near all of those locations build out the architecture of systems at scales I only once dreamed of.

I've been fortunate enough, and able to exercise the freedom to pursue technological, thought leadership, or overall directional decisions due to the flexibility and choices to endorse open cultures in our work environments by Red Hat.

My favorite so far, I've worked on projects both on this world -- and off. I can't talk about that one much though. :)

Matt's hunger-for-knowledge led mentoring style left a strong impression on me. It left me constantly searching for my own answers and directions while able to follow a general compass from a more senior professional. Since I entered into the workforce I've made myself available for the same opportunities to others as well.

I mentor a handful of people at varying ages now and soon one of them may end up at Red Hat themselves. To pick on this mentee for a moment, I did what my mentor did with me – I answered his questions but left him wanting more to seek the technology knowledge he was looking for without handing him the answers. His work, achievements, and drive are all his own.

Mentorship needs to include the accepted freedom to make mistakes; because without that you're limited in the creative flexibility you need to try new things.

We kept in contact yearly, quarterly sometimes, and I lightly offered direct advice where appropriate and guidance everywhere else. As I did (and still do), my mentees make mistakes along the way but that's okay. So long as the mentee returns with questions, confusion, and sometimes anguish, we continue to work together – as my mentor did with me.

The community I grew up in is dangerously close to impoverished for several reasons, and the access we had to equitable high-quality education around technology and computer science was close to, if not, zero.

It's a blessing, yet also just a matter of happenstance that an enterprise technology professional was able to make a pit stop, throw some breadcrumbs down, and leave a 13 year trail for me to follow and drop my own crumbs for others along the way.

The crux of this story is Matt only came to this event because his aunt happened to be the principal at my middle school, and this entire lifelong crusade of Open Source evangelism, Linux, Virtualization, IoT, Kubernetes, automation, and earlier than needed advice from a skillful, thoughtful IT professional would have otherwise never happened – and I wonder where I'd be.

Now, I wonder for my own younger mentees as well. I probably would have made several delaying mistakes along the way. The kindness of a stranger is what made that difference.

Try to go out of your way to mentor someone looking for direction to channel their inspiration or otherwise seeking guidance. My mentor could have seen a dorky 12 year old, chalked my questions up to Dunning-Kruger-isms, and kept on with his life yet he didn't.

Thanks to Matt, he spent a few dozen hours just over a decade guiding me while I crafted a honed in technology perspective, a thoughtful framework through which to operate in unfamiliar territory with in this industry, and the ability to blaze a trail for myself and those around me.

He had zero responsibility to that.

The success of impoverished or misfortune ridden areas should not rely on the lynchpin of one successful individual sharing their advice and yet often times it still does.

Offer the same chance of opportunity to others around you who may not have access to the same avenues. Choose to mentor individuals you see potential in. Mentorship can be formal, informal, conformal, abnormal (avoid paranormal) however you see fit, but choose to do it and come back to it because you never know what one half hour of your hard-fought perspective might do for the rest of someone's life.

Michael is Solutions Architect at Red Hat. All opinions and thoughts are his own and not a statement by any employer.