About

Hello, my name is Courtney Bodett. I am an IT professional in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve always been a casual tinkerer with many things throughout my life. I was curious about how things work and a little scared that if I tried to work on anything myself, I might break it. When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to be a bicycle mechanic, so I went to school to learn how. A short while later, after graduating from a school for this trade, I got a job at a local shop turning wrenches.

I had ridden bikes since I was a kid. I knew what most of the parts did and how they interacted with each other, and I could ride a bike pretty well. But the thought of trying to adjust a derailleur on my own or even change out a chain was terrifying. Learning how actually to work on bikes changed all of that, and it opened my eyes. Suddenly it didn’t matter if it was repairing a bike, swapping a cam gear on a motorcycle, or fixing a dishwasher: if I could learn how to do it, it didn’t seem that scary.

Despite this new realization, my experience with computers remained only slightly deeper than casual. I used them frequently, played games, edited photos, even tinkered with modding games occasionally. But if you asked me what an IP address was, I couldn’t tell you.

One summer, late in college, I took a summer job working phone support at a local ISP and installing cable modems. I quickly learned how frightening it was to get thrown headfirst into something you were unfamiliar with and how rewarding it was to solve a problem. I was eager to learn everything they were willing to teach me. I began to learn Vi and Bash and administered some of the Unix servers in-house.

It’s been a long journey since then, and I still find myself in IT loving it every day. There’s always something new to learn, some problem to solve, some solution to discover for a customer. I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned in IT with others and presenting it in a human-understandable way. This blog will serve as a place for me to publish some of my work to share with others.