Greetings from Gippsland; and looking for remote work
Hey everyone, Some of you already know me, and I hope you're doing well! As I'm currently between roles, Rodney suggested the LUV jobs service to me. However, it looks like the jobs mailing list was recently closed, so hopefully it's okay for me to put out some feelers on main instead :) I'm based in Loch Sport. I moved here last year under the impression I'd have 100% remote work forever after. Unfortunately, that was a bit premature and the remote work prospects seem to be drying up lately :P Oops. I do really love it here though, so any more remote work I can find soon would be awesome. Needing to sell up and relocate again would absolutely break my heart. I will even consider part time or junior work right now. Low-bureaucracy roles preferred, so I can keep using my custom workstations without worrying about ISO-27001 or IRAP style compliance checkboxing. Well, enough of the sob story. The real question on your mind is why should someone hire me? I'll send a CV on request, but in the meantime here are the elevator pitches: * Nearly ten years operating Ubuntu Server fleets for OpenStack and HPC. Most recently in so-called neo-clouds, I've got strong experience with most OpenStack services and their supporting infrastructure such as VLANs, Ceph, OVS, Mariadb/MySQL, Bind9, Prometheus, Grafana, NetBox, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, Gerrit and GitHub Actions. I've dealt with a wide variety of hardware including Dell, SuperMicro, Asus, HPE and OctoMiner, with Mellanox cards and up to 8x NVIDIA cards at once, with NVLinks and SR-IOV. I've done plenty of deployments with MAAS and orchestrated the warranties of so much faulty hardware you just wouldn't believe. I can script IPMITool and Redfish. * I've been devoted to Linux since 2008, and have built up a deep knowledge of all the sysadmin "primitives" such as shell scripting, namespaces, OpenSSH, device manager, filesystems, IPtables, dnsmasq, iproute2, kernel memory management, Git, C programming, jq, LMod and the GNU ecosystem. I'm great at applying my knowledge of these primitives to engineer minimalistic, robust and reproducible systems and pipelines. I'm also an official GNU maintainer and, as an extra flex, everything in my SOHO (including my custom router) runs Gentoo BTW. * I'm a STEM/HASS jack-of-all-trades with a background in Mathematics & Statistics and a wide variety of side interests. I bust silos and learn fast. If you're wondering whether I can do something you have in mind, the real question is "when can I start?" * Awesome remote work setup: two redundant workstations so I can keep working in event of hardware failure, and business-tier 1000/400 fttp. Lots of experience with remote collaboration including Slack, Teams and Zoom. I never suffer the audio or video issues that plague basically everyone else in online calls. I also cultivate strong remote work cultures based on kind, clear and regular communication, and engineering discipline. * I've got an ABN so could do contract gigs if that's preferred. I hope you'll reach out if you want someone who will hit the ground running and start getting things done without any BS as soon as you add my ssh keys to your servers. If you added my ssh keys yesterday, I could have been deploying solutions to production today ;) I'm also open to meeting up with anyone around the Morwell/Traralgon/Sale/Bairnsdale area if you just feel like a coffee. I have daily fresh hot takes on AI as well as all your old time favorite holy wars! So ping me if you're around :) And feel free to connect on LinkedIn if that's how you roll: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-rice-45641329b/ Thanks for your patience with this email, hopefully it's not too much noise for this list! Kind regards, Tim Rice
On Tuesday, 23 June 2026 08:38:39 AEST Tim Rice via luv-main wrote:
Some of you already know me, and I hope you're doing well!
As I'm currently between roles, Rodney suggested the LUV jobs service to me. However, it looks like the jobs mailing list was recently closed, so hopefully it's okay for me to put out some feelers on main instead :)
We recently did a reorganisation of the lists and the luv-jobs list was removed because it had hardly any traffic and hardly any subscribers. There are some topics where a small number of people is sufficient, but for jobs most employers won't hiring at any given time and the ones that are might not have a fit for your skills. So quantity is very important for jobs.
I'm based in Loch Sport. I moved here last year under the impression I'd have 100% remote work forever after. Unfortunately, that was a bit premature and the remote work prospects seem to be drying up lately :P Oops.
It sucks the way the government is trying to prop up real estate companies by encouraging office based work. Especially when we have world-wide fuel shortages and driving to work is extremely inefficient for petrol vehicles. But there are companies hiring for remote. The last few positions I've been in discussions with over Linkedin have emphasised the remote component of the work up front. Some of the positions I've been in discussions with have been advertised as partially remote work with the first few weeks on-site. If I was in your situation I'd make plans around living in a motel for a few weeks at the start of employment and spending one week a month in a motel. This of course depends on your personal situation, my health is fine for living in motels and I don't have any dependents who would suffer if I was away for a week but not everyone is in that situation. I have idly considered actively seeking such work in places that are within a day's driving such as Canberra. I try to avoid planes as much as possible, I have caught Covid19 once and that was on a work flight.
* Nearly ten years operating Ubuntu Server fleets for OpenStack and HPC. Most recently in so-called neo-clouds, I've got strong experience with most OpenStack services and their supporting infrastructure such as VLANs, Ceph, OVS, Mariadb/MySQL, Bind9, Prometheus, Grafana, NetBox, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, Gerrit and GitHub Actions. I've dealt with a wide variety of hardware including Dell, SuperMicro, Asus, HPE and OctoMiner, with Mellanox cards and up to 8x NVIDIA cards at once, with NVLinks and SR-IOV. I've done plenty of deployments with MAAS and orchestrated the warranties of so much faulty hardware you just wouldn't believe. I can script IPMITool and Redfish.
That's a decent skill set and a good match for a lot of positions. I'd definitely like to have someone with those skills as a colleague.
* I've been devoted to Linux since 2008, and have built up a deep knowledge of all the sysadmin "primitives" such as shell scripting, namespaces, OpenSSH, device manager, filesystems, IPtables, dnsmasq, iproute2, kernel memory management, Git, C programming, jq, LMod and the GNU ecosystem. I'm great at applying my knowledge of these primitives to engineer minimalistic, robust and reproducible systems and pipelines. I'm also an official GNU maintainer and, as an extra flex, everything in my SOHO (including my custom router) runs Gentoo BTW.
What are you the GNU maintainer for? Do you have an active Github account? https://github.com/etbe I've heard that some employers like to look at Github as part of the hiring process, I've never been into github and only use it when forced to do so. It shows my PRs but I don't have projects there. I have idly considered just putting a heap of stuff there to make it look impressive. https://salsa.debian.org/users/etbe/projects I have stuff in Salsa (the Debian git system) but I don't know if employers will be interested in that. Maybe I'm just better off not working for a company that can't look at Salsa.
And feel free to connect on LinkedIn if that's how you roll: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-rice-45641329b/
I've sent a connection request. https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-coker-69652a1a/ Here's my Linkedin page for any active LUV members who want to connect.
Thanks for your patience with this email, hopefully it's not too much noise for this list!
The problem we face with this list is lack of content. So anything vaguely related to Linux goes at this time. Hopefully after Phil's good work in fixing the list software we can get more discussion happening but even if/when that happens posts about Linux employment will remain on topic here. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
Hey Russell!
We recently did a reorganisation of the lists and the luv-jobs list was removed because it had hardly any traffic and hardly any subscribers. There are some topics where a small number of people is sufficient, but for jobs most employers won't hiring at any given time and the ones that are might not have a fit for your skills. So quantity is very important for jobs.
Yep, that's totally fair.
It sucks the way the government is trying to prop up real estate companies by encouraging office based work. Especially when we have world-wide fuel shortages and driving to work is extremely inefficient for petrol vehicles.
Not just fuel, but also time and opportunities to get out of renting. I used to spend an hour and a half each day just to get between Pasoce Vale and University of Melbourne, and had to rent since I don't think I can pay off a one million dollar house before I'm dead. Working remotely allows spending that commute time on mentally recharging, and at least for a while made buying seem viable, since I was no longer married to the city. I could understand needing to be on site if there were a need for physical presence, eg data center work obviously. But when I can use async comms, Git, VPNs, and ssh to transcend time and space, expecting to chain me to a chair under painful fluoro lights in a distracting office from 9-5 (which is realistically more like 8-6 with commute) just seems perverse.
But there are companies hiring for remote. The last few positions I've been in discussions with over Linkedin have emphasised the remote component of the work up front.
Some of the positions I've been in discussions with have been advertised as partially remote work with the first few weeks on-site. If I was in your situation I'd make plans around living in a motel for a few weeks at the start of employment and spending one week a month in a motel. This of course depends on your personal situation, my health is fine for living in motels and I don't have any dependents who would suffer if I was away for a week but not everyone is in that situation.
I have idly considered actively seeking such work in places that are within a day's driving such as Canberra. I try to avoid planes as much as possible, I have caught Covid19 once and that was on a work flight.
That's interesting. I don't have responsibilities like pets or dependents, so I'd be open to living away from home for a bit if travel and accommodation were paid for.
What are you the GNU maintainer for? Do you have an active Github account?
I've heard that some employers like to look at Github as part of the hiring process, I've never been into github and only use it when forced to do so. It shows my PRs but I don't have projects there. I have idly considered just putting a heap of stuff there to make it look impressive.
https://salsa.debian.org/users/etbe/projects
I have stuff in Salsa (the Debian git system) but I don't know if employers will be interested in that. Maybe I'm just better off not working for a company that can't look at Salsa.
I'm lead maintainer for GNU Datamash, and on the books as a possible successor to Arnold Robbins for gawk. Possibly maintaining gawk in future is very intimidating, so I balked a bit at first, but one thing I'm doing during this downtime period is trying to become more active there. I'm https://github.com/cryptarch on GitHub, but like you I don't have much on display there at the moment. I used to have a bunch of stuff, but I took it down eight years ago in protest over MicroSoft buying them out. I haven't got around to re-upping much, even though I'm now more resigned to the situation :P
Thanks for your patience with this email, hopefully it's not too much noise for this list!
The problem we face with this list is lack of content. So anything vaguely related to Linux goes at this time. Hopefully after Phil's good work in fixing the list software we can get more discussion happening but even if/when that happens posts about Linux employment will remain on topic here.
Cool, thanks :) ~ Tim
participants (2)
-
luv＠tr.id.au -
Russell Coker