Meet BJ Walker - our Red Hatter of the Week!
This week's featured Red Hatter is BJ Walker, Team Leader and Technical Support Engineer for Anaconda and Desktop.
In his own words:
"Hi, my name is BJ Walker and I am originally from San Diego, California, though I have been living in North Carolina for about 15 years now. I attended college at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, NC, best known for only having a single stop light in the town, where I received my Bachelors of Science in Psychology with an dual minor Sociology and Business Administration. Originally my goal was to counsel teenagers and young adults however after being bitten by the technology bug I started to become more and more interested in tinkering both in software and hardware, and this interest brought me to work for Apple, Inc. At Apple I started working part time in Sales but eventually made my way into working as a Genius Technician, handling both software and hardware troubleshooting and working with customers to resolve any and every issue they may have had. I was with Apple for 3 years before I was made aware of Red Hat through mutual friend of my wife. After doing some research and applying to work in Global Support Services (GSS) I took a position in May of 2011.
Currently my role in GSS is multifaceted. My current titles are Team Lead and Technical Support Engineer for our Desktop and Anaconda groups. As a Team Lead for GSS my job is to oversee the day to day operations of case management for our North American offices, ensuring that we are able to handle all incoming calls and cases with efficiency and technical aptitude and are able to get the appropriate resources dedicated to the specific areas of knowlege they may have. The second part of my job, as a Technical Support Engineer allows me to work within the areas of both Anaconda, our installation environment, and Desktop. Through these two Specialty Based Routing groups (SBR's), I am able to help customers handle anything from issues they may have within a GUI environment to installing our products or modifying their system using YUM or RPM.
What I enjoy the most about my role here at Red Hat is being given the opportunity to help other people find more efficient ways to do the same tasks that may have been causing issues before. Whether this is working internally with our staff to refine workflow to ensure that we are able to provide our customers deeply technical and customer friendly updates or working with our customers to provide them a means to deploy hundreds of systems without the headache of having to go to each machine, each day affords me the opportunity to help others, which is what I love.
Outside of Red Hat I love spending time backpacking with my wife, buliding pillow forts with my son, stalking the local food trucks and learning how to grow the most prestigious Linux beard possible."
