I’ve been in the Information Technology industry for almost 30 years now. I’m not sure where the time goes. It seems like yesterday I was a bright-eyed Marine recruit standing on the yellow footprints at Parris Island, SC, but that was 26 years ago. I was fortunate enough to go the US Marine Corps Computer Science School where I completed their IT operations curriculum that set me on this journey. It’s afforded me many a great opportunity, including my current job as a Enterprise Account Engineer (Technical Account Manager, TAM) at Amazon in their web services division. For those of you not in tech, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the part of the larger Amazon company that builds and leases cloud computing to other companies. It’s actually their most profitable arm. The retail side of Amazon isn’t actually all that profitable, and the AWS portion often ends up propping the rest of the company up financially, but I digress.

Being an old-school technologist like myself, I’m sometimes hesitant to pick up new technologies, or if I do, I only partially adopt it. I was reading an article recently on trends in social media and the gist of it was saying that traditional social media, Facebook, Instagram, and possibly even Twitter, are languishing and that newer social media is on the rise, things like TikTok and Discord. You’ll never catch me using TikTok for various reasons, and if you care about the security of your finances or your personal information, you shouldn’t use it either. However, I have been using one of these technologies for sometime and I believe I have failed to fully embrace. The platform I refer to would be Discord.

Even being of a mature age now, I’m in my mid forties, I still like to play video games. I play with my buddies and my nephew. It’s really the only interaction I have with my nephew, so it’s fairly important to me. I play games such as Call of Duty: Vanguard, Battlefield 1, and my current favorite, Valorant. I’ve been playing Counter-Strike in it’s various forms for the last 20 years, but I don’t have anyone to play that with these days. The technology we use to communicate while playing from our various geographic locations is a platform called Discord. For those of you into gaming or tech, you’re well aware of this platform. For those of you that are not, it’s just an online chat service. If you’re older, it’s a lot like the AOL Instant Messenger rooms of yesteryear.

While I use this platform to chat with my nephew and my buddies while playing games, I kind of missed the “forest for the trees” on this one. I was missing it’s real application in the fact it can be a direct line of communication without sacrificing anonymity or personal information. I don’t hide who I am, but I don’t want to give my personal phone number or email out to the entire world. So in that vain, I started a Discord server for folks to join to chat about whatever their heart’s content; although my primary focus on it will be gaming and Linux. If you’re looking to connect with me, feel to drop in and say “hello.” I’m active daily there and will be happy to help you our with whatever Linux questions you may have, or if you just want to drop in and chat about gaming. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.