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About quaid

We really should say something about ourselves, shouldn’t we?

Summary for the impatient:

Hi, my name is Karsten Wade, I’ve worked at Red Hat since 2001 and am a 21 year IT industry professional. I am a long time Fedora Project contributor and general open source iconoclast. I am also a CentOS Project board member. As a member of the industry leading community leadership team at Red Hat, I have seen, done, and recovered from many open community mistakes. Through mistakes, learning; through learning, advancement. By teaching and learning with others, we improve the fabric of all open source communities.

I live in Santa Cruz, CA, with my wife and two daughters on a small urban farm, Fairy-TaleFarm.com. We have an alternate transportation business, Santa Cruz Pedicab.

Find me at Fairy-Tale Farm, Twitter, GitHub, Linked In, Facebook,identi.ca, Flickr, YouTube … bored of this yet?

Here is a quick list of what I am working on right now:

Here is a random list of what I worked on in the past, dead or alive.

  • Fedora Documentation Project team lead.
  • Fedora Project Board member.
  • Red Hat SELinux Guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
    • SELinux FAQ maintainer and founding member of Fedora SELinux community

Tl:dnr biography that I will randomly grow over time:

I was born in Southern California, and raised (from four years old) in Santa Cruz.  I occasionally attended New York University and University of California, Santa Cruz, studying creative writing, English literature, and journalism.  From 1989 through 1995 I worked in some fabulous restaurants kitchens inSanta Cruz – from dishes to driving the wheel at the O’Mei; all over the place at India Joze; helped open and close a few places; finally finished at Clouds Downtown.  From there I restarted the career path as an HTML cowboy for a few small web boutiques.  This was 1995, and by the end of 1996 I was part of a three-person boutique, but we couldn’t find more than enough business for one person.  We all went off to get real jobs to support our families and/or habits, and I landed at a construction management firm, the Luster Group, in San Francisco.  At Luster, I was IT-everything, did some web work, and  learned the ins and outs of professional services firms.  I helped bid on multiple-thousand, million-, and billion-dollar projects.  We had our first girl in 1998, and it was clear we weren’t going to have the young hip couple in the big city experience nor the small town to raise our children experience, so we left Berkeley and moved back to Santa Cruz.  Ah, what a relief.  I joined a radio station website and streaming company in the fall of 1998, where I was the IT manager until August of 2000.  I learned all the ins and outs of running a mixed IT environment for a 100 person company of developers, designers, sales people, customer service, managers, executives, and so on …