What do you do?

[ei8fdb]

Apologies for the maybe pointed question - but as a UX Designer I'm curious about the backgrounds of Cloudron users.

I'm interested in knowing people's jobs/professions/what they spend most of their day doing.

I'm interested if people are mostly "infrastructure profession users" (sysadmins, devops), "developer/programming users", not-technical users (gross over-simplified term, no insult meant), scientists, academic, or someone like me ux designer/graphic/visual designers (somewhere in between the technical and non-technical user).

My reasoning for asking is to see if there are similarities between people here and UX designers I meet and work with who say "oh I can't be bothered/don't have the skills to move away from Google/Office265/Dropbox".

I was thinking of creating a simple survey. Would there be any objections?

[will]

I'm a senior security consultant for a silicon valley company and I consult on network security for the U.S. Department of Defense.
I am very much in the "do it yourself" category digitally, but tempered with productivity/ease of use.
My background is System Administration, and I have no programming skills. But I'm learning!

[scooke]

You could install LimeSurvey and give it a try for all of us!

[ei8fdb]

@scooke I use Limesurvey a lot. It is comprehensive, and very powerful but (how do I put this diplomatically) takes a long time to achieve what is much quicker with other tools. I'll put one together.

[girish]

I am one of the co-founders. Before I started Cloudron, I used to be a C++ developer (contributed a lot to Qt, WebKit, Crosswalk, KDE). Back then, I used to self-host things but it wasn't a conscious choice, it was just what people did (for example, i used to self-host gitosis before github, mediawiki etc). I think the turning point was Google Reader shutdown which forced me to make a conscious choice. And now I am a web developer

[iamthefij]

Software Engineer turned Director at a Silicon Valley company.

After the switch to management I was eager for a technical project and decided to take on self hosting for privacy and ethical reasons as well as the technical challenge. I’ve made several attempts at managing all my self hosted services from scratch and eventually found Cloudron.

[YurkshireLad]

I'm just a boring s/w developer, nothing exciting about me.

[d19dotca]

Great question! I'm currently a Senior Technical Support Engineer for a large Fortune 150 tech company, that's my day job. My roles before that were more sysadmin oriented for two smaller companies. Then I run my own business (freelance work) for web design & hosting, email hosting, tech support, etc. for local small businesses and individuals. That's where Cloudron comes in for me, it's basically for helping me save time while I manage customer websites and emails, etc. and so far I'm quite impressed with Cloudron and the team behind it.

[A Former User]

I am Head of the service desk in a software company in Germany and responsible for data protection issues. My roots lie in activities as system administrator and consultant for LAN / WAN topics.

Privately I am interested in IT topics and data economy also and try to free myself more and more from the data kraken.
I am certified as CCNA, MCSA (Server and Desktop), SLCA, ACSP, ACTC, SLCA and plan to become more of an admin in the future again, towards Linux Graduate and Kubernetes. Especially regarding the new European program Gaia-X and the growing possibilities it offers, this seems to be future-proof.

[mehdi]

I'm the co-founder and CTO of a startup specialized in data encryption : https://seald.io if anyone's interested

[thetomester13]

I'm a software engineer and always loved web technologies. I got into self-hosted because Google Reader shut down (@girish isn't alone!). I felt pretty strongly about it and even wrote a blog post about how I got into it - featuring Cloudron of course. Now self hosting is a hobby on the side of my main work.

[will]

I didn't realize we had such a group of badasses here. Glad to learn a little more about each of you.

[necrevistonnezr]

I‘m a lawyer working in the field of i.a. data privacy law who is just very interested in tech and likes to run things at home. Also, the rules of our profession require us to not give data of our clients to any third party which rules the use out most US based web services.

[murgero]

I am an IT Consultant and Web Developer.

[msbt]

I'm a web developer for a startup and run my own little company on the side which offers programming and hosting for designers, agencies and other customers.

[jeau]

I am in charge of publishing and communication for a centre of scientific, technical and industrial culture located in France.

[JOduMonT]

I start programming with a Commodore64 than manage network and system (BSD, Mac, Linux, Windows, Cisco, Juniper, ...) than went back to school and became certified Cloud+, Linux SysAdmin and Ethical Hacker and now I would like to pass to a next level (Teaching, Coaching, Empowering, ...) with OpenSource and CommonSense.

[nebulon]

Hi all. Next to @girish I am the other founder of Cloudron. Before that I was working at Nokia where I basically got into webtech as a developer. I used to be a C++/Qt developer after coming even from Gtk/XFCE back in the days.

I host my own things since some time around 2000, but prior to working on Cloudron never really got deeper into sysadmin topics, which also meant I couldn't really host everything I wanted and needed. That was a big driver for me to work on Cloudron, just to be able to run more things besides the LAMP stack scripts basically.

[rmdes]

I have no idea what I am but I have been hosting different CMS's over the last 2 decades (for friends and clients) which lead me to gradually move from shared hosting to self-hosting.

I learned a lot in the process and sometimes around 2016 launched a very little digital/tech consulting project with @ruihildt and it's in this context that we went full Cloudron not just to host clients needs but also some friends and personal needs/wants, it has been an even more interesting ride ever since !

Since Covid-19 I'm at a crossroad, there has never been so much need for coaching, teaching and pivoting people into digital solutions and entrepreneurship, I'm divided between this or learning to code towards working as backend devop, so I'm using this second lockdown to figure out my next steps

[ei8fdb]

@rmdes Good luck with the decision on which road to take.