When someone asks me about the starting point of my career, I always tell them about my Linux/BSD adventure. These operating systems still exist and most people know them, but not everyone knows about Pardus, and even if they do, it is not the same Pardus I mean.

I grew up in a house without internet and the only connection to the world was through technology and gaming magazines. I used to rewrite the articles in magazines that I liked and wanted to understand on my typewriter because I read too fast and didn’t understand anything, so the typewriter was kind of slowdown for me. Sometimes codes were shared in magazines and they would also write what the output would be when we compile and run these codes. That’s something a typewriter could never do. So I grew up dreaming of owning a personal computer until I started university.

When I got my first computer, I remember that the operating system installed on it was FreeDOS. Honestly, I didn’t even know how to connect to the internet, so I looked into installing another operating system instead. Windows was a very nice alternative, but it was expensive and I had to buy a license. Then I had heard a lot about Linux from magazines, but before that I want to try FreeBSD first, I don’t know why but I thought that it may easier than Linux. There were many distributions of Linux and I couldn’t decide which is better for me. But FreeBSD is already a ready-to-use operating system. I already had magazines with information on how to install FreeBSD and how to connect to the internet. I managed with that for a couple of months.

Then I discovered some great Linux communities: forums, rooms on Freenode, events, new friendships, spontaneous meetings, and so on. The strongest of these communities, in my opinion, was Pardus. It’s a Linux distribution that is developed by TÜBİTAK, and I did my intern in this significant instituon. TÜBİTAK means “Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye”, is the leading agency for management, funding and conduct of research in Türkiye.

When I started to use Pardus, most of the core tools of the operating system was developed in Python: PiSi, Kaptan, YALI, pyxemel, etc. Normally I was planning to learn Ruby but all my friends in Pardus community preferred to continue with Python. I don’t regret it but since I couldn’t use Ruby on Rails in any project, it remained a disappointment to me. But on the other hand, I got my first salary with Django and it wasn’t bad either.

Pardus is a Debian based distribution anymore. I don’t know what the community is doing these days but I think those old days are over for me.