Bush was about six when he had his first introduction to a computer. "In 1988, I think it was, Dad came home one day with our first computer - a Commodore Amiga 500. He and I learned to code in AMOS and AmigaBASIC from magazines, and I spent some time painting and doing animations in Deluxe Paint. I still have my Amiga and fire it up whenever I'm feeling nostalgic."
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And, like many others in the open source community, though he does have several formal qualifications, he has taught himself most of what he knows,
Bush was home-schooled until high school with a few years of institutionalised primary school thrown in when the family moved from the outer western suburbs of Sydney to Tasmania in 1993. He says he is really thankful for those primary school years.
His entry into a tech-related job came about after he wrote an essay on how internet technology could change the lives of people in rural communities. "That caught the interest of some people involved with the Tasmanian Communities Online project, and I scored myself a job with the pilot programme, which was based inside the State Library's Deloraine branch," he says.
This was the first public online access centre in Tasmania. Bush worked there until the funding ran out and then served as secretary on the steering committee and a volunteer at the centre after he moved from Deloraine to Launceston. He has diplomas in programming, database design and administration, and a couple of other smaller IT qualifications, which he obtained at TAFE colleges.
"As seems to be the story with most people I know, the qualifications that you earn often have little bearing on the work you do," he says. "I'm a professional photographer and I do freelance graphic design, I've done stints in retail, held the often under-appreciated position of pizza delivery driver, and I've been doing combined sysadmin and tech support roles as my day job for the past four years."
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