by Jim Winstead Jr.
Through this time I was also involved in the open source community. In college, I was involved in the very early days of Linux, and I took over maintenance from Linus of the “root” disk used to install Linux before distributions. While working on websites for Knowledge Adventure, I got involved with the the PHP project , and became a founding member of the PHP Group. I helped set up and maintain some of the collaborative development infrastructure, including the mailing lists and online documentation feedba
After MySQL Ab was acquired by Sun Microsystems (and then further by Oracle), I co-founded Raw Materials Art Supplies , a retail store in downtown Los Angeles which I operated as general manager for the last 15 years. I built Scat POS , a point of sale and ecommerce system using PHP and MySQL that we used to run the business. It involved a lot of integration work (payment processors, product feeds, shipping), and I automated as much as I could to focus on our artists' needs. This enabled us to build our bus