Hey Pixel - it was a cool experience. Sean Huck and Amanda Davis were awesome to work with. I discovered that being filmed while talking makes me quite nervous. But.. they helped me work through that ;-)

I can answer all your questions with a quick story... I went to College to become a high school physics teacher and one summer decided to take summer courses. To get some "extra" money I applied to a opening at the Campus IT Help Desk. After having a few professors belittle me for not being the person to solve their problems (I was just supposed to answer phones) I decided I could learn a thing or two about this computer stuff. Fortunately the other folks I worked with at the help desk were nerds. This was at a time when dialup was still a privilege and you could get "Linux" on a set of floppy disks that someone had created. At that point we were all pretty competitive to "one-up" each other. (like getting KDE installed and configured). I don't even recall what version of Linux or whose release it was. The bug was planted that summer and I switched my Major to MIS.
Interestingly enough, after college... when I started to roll in to a career position, I decided I wanted to work on the "big Iron" and UNIX - which I really enjoyed. At that point Linux (and specifically Red Hat) was a cursory thing to me - destined to be a mail server or a web server. However, the landscape for the particular UNIX I had chosen changed significantly around the late 2000's and I wanted something different (which is what I meant by my comment about "I could have chosen any career path" - I hadn't meant I would become a doctor or something, I meant I could chose any technical IT path, but chose Red Hat ;-). I considered the other UNIX environments as well as the other Linux environments - and though I felt Red Hat was really just starting to "get legs" at that point, it seemed like they were going to do big things... and in the right way. Then Jboss really starts to take off... and they acquire Qumranet, and Gluster, etc...

TL;DR - started playing with Linux around 2000 with my college friends. Used it for trivial things until around 2009 when I embraced Linux Red Hat as the future and was basically my first commercial experience. At this point, I think Red Hat can do almost ANYthing in a data center now. (I would strike out the 'almost' but that is a pretty bold statement that folks like Jim Whitehurst make ;-)

After being on the portal now for a while, I have a much greater respect for the Support organization at Red Hat. I don't know how many times I lead in to a response with "I don't know for certain, but..." - in contrast, Red Hat simply has the answers.