[panic_on_oops]

Back in high school. I had a Thinkpad running windows (I'm in my early 30s today), and 2 days before an assignment was due, my brother knocked it off a table, it hit every step down to the ground floor. The board was pretty much done (it was an old Thinkpad) and I had to figure out a way to salvage some of the data, so I did some research online.

I ended up downloading Ubuntu, created a bootable USB and managed to fish out my documents from the disks. Fast forward to today, and I'm part of an Ops team running and developing software to manage around 10K Ubuntu servers across several colocations.

I don't have children (yet), but for the parents out there - push your kids to tinker with technology, don't just buy a new one when it breaks. For me it started out with breaking and assembling back almost every toy my parents bought me, to understand its internals. Please nurture this instinct.