25 Years of Writing About Tech

Recently I migrated 44 articles I wrote for Linux.com between 1999 and 2002 to this site’s archive. Reading through them was like opening a time capsule from a version of myself I barely recognize.

The Beginning

My first published article was “Microsoft and the Art of War” on July 6, 1999. I was 20 years old, a computer science student at New Mexico State University, and absolutely convinced that Linux was going to change everything. Looking at that piece now, what strikes me is the ambition of it all. I was analyzing Microsoft’s competitive strategy through the lens of Sun Tzu, predicting they might release “MS BSD” (they didn’t), and signing off as a “struggling computer science student” who was “highly anticipating all the flames on his poor grammar.”

The flames did come. When I wrote a series about trying BSD, the Slashdot commenters let me know I wasn’t qualified to have opinions about their operating system. One commenter had been using BSD since 1982. I’d been playing with He-Man and G.I. Joe in 1982.

What I Got Wrong

I made some bold predictions in those early pieces. In “The Twisted Pair: Netscape and Linux,” I warned that Linux companies could suffer Netscape’s fate if they underestimated Microsoft. I was right about the danger of complacency, but I completely missed that the real threat to those Linux companies wouldn’t be Microsoft at all. It would be commoditization, venture capital hype cycles, and the shift to cloud computing.

In “Don’t Call It a Comeback,” I speculated that Microsoft was deliberately sandbagging their antitrust defense because they’d already shifted focus to controlling internet infrastructure. This was giving Microsoft way too much strategic credit. The reality was messier: internal politics, genuine legal missteps, and the chaos of any large organization trying to navigate change.

I was certain that desktop Linux was just around the corner once we solved the “big four” applications: office productivity, games, financial software, and internet tools. We did eventually get all of those. And desktop Linux market share is still in the single digits, twenty-five years later. The lesson: solving the technical problems doesn’t automatically solve the adoption problems.

What I Got Right

Some things landed closer to the mark. I wrote about the importance of welcoming new users rather than hazing them with RTFM culture. That tension between accessibility and gatekeeping continues to play out in every technical community. I argued that Linux’s diversity and multiple companies was a strength, not a weakness. The ecosystem did survive the dot-com crash, the death of VA Linux’s hardware business, and countless distribution shake-ups.

My piece about OpenBSD praised their daily security reports that showed file permission changes and config diffs. I said I needed that functionality on my Linux servers. Today that’s table stakes for any serious infrastructure: file integrity monitoring, configuration drift detection, audit logging. The security-conscious philosophy I admired in OpenBSD became standard practice.

The Writer I Was

Reading those articles, I notice stylistic tics I’ve since outgrown. The military metaphors were relentless: “opening skirmishes,” “master stroke,” “counter-offensive.” Every analysis was framed as warfare. I quoted Sun Tzu in my first article and kept reaching for combat language throughout.

I was also remarkably willing to speculate beyond my expertise. At 20, I wrote confidently about corporate strategy, market dynamics, and technological trajectories. Some of that confidence was necessary to get published at all. But there’s a lot of “should” and “must” in those pieces that makes me wince now. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

The fiction pieces surprise me most. I’d forgotten I wrote short stories for Linux.com. “Obsession” is about a programmer so consumed by his encryption project that he loses his girlfriend. The themes are classic: technology versus human connection, idealism versus practical life, the seductive pull of meaningful work. The execution is earnest and clumsy and very 1999.

What Changed

Over the years, my writing shifted. The Linux.com articles evolved from fiery opinion pieces to more measured analysis, then to technical tutorials and event reporting. The author bios changed too: from “struggling computer science student” and “Linux Guru wannabe” to simply “exists in the New Mexican desert.”

That desert reference was accurate. I was young, isolated, trying to connect with a global community through dial-up internet and mailing lists. Writing was how I participated. Getting published on Linux.com felt like being granted entry to a conversation that mattered.

Twenty-five years later, I’ve worked at Amazon, AWS, Uber, Twitter, and Meta. I’ve seen the infrastructure that makes the modern internet possible. The scale would have been incomprehensible to the version of me who was excited about 50% web server market share.

Why Archive These

I could have left these articles in the Wayback Machine, where I found them. The original Linux.com site is long gone, and most of these pieces exist only because someone thought to archive that corner of the internet before it disappeared.

But they’re part of my history. The person who wrote “Microsoft and the Art of War” became the person who eventually worked on the systems he was writing about. There’s a direct line from being a twenty-year-old who cared intensely about free software to spending a career building and maintaining distributed systems.

The predictions were often wrong. The analysis was sometimes naive. The metaphors were overwrought. But the enthusiasm was genuine, and the community those articles connected me to shaped the rest of my career.

If you’re twenty years old and writing things on the internet that seem important, keep going. You’ll look back in twenty-five years and cringe at some of it. But you’ll also see how those ideas, even the wrong ones, helped you figure out what you actually believed.