Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and … turned him down.
Gareth Swanepoel circa 2007
Thankfully, my manager overruled me and hired him anyway.
Thank goodness – and thank goodness Gareth forgave me for my incredibly bad judgment, hahaha.
Gareth proved to be one of the hardest-working, most-determined people I’d ever met. He was endlessly curious – it wasn’t enough to solve a problem – he wanted to know how the thing worked, whatever it was. He wanted to know everything about hardware, operating systems, networking,