Jul 17, 2026 · 40 min · 12 segments
Major Hayden — longtime Fedora packager and Red Hat engineer, formerly of Rackspace — joins host Jay Faulkner to talk about imposter syndrome in tech, and the framework he's used for over a decade to…
I got to start with Mandrake back in the day, and then I made my way into Gentoo because I wanted to optimize everything to the extent.
And I remember warming up my apartment in San Antonio during the wintertime, compiling something, either the kernel or KDE or something like that.
And then after that, You know, went through Ubuntu, went through a couple other ones.
And there was a while there where it was like maybe about three or four big ones.
It's not terribly far away from Red Hat stuff, which is what I was doing on the servers.
And so that's what got me really excited because I was like, wow, I can write scripts.
I've participated in, I think, was it the, I can't remember what it was called, like Fedora Council at one point.
And it was just so much fun to see people that wanted to propose fun things to do in Fedora to help communities we didn't even know existed.
And to be able to help out with that and guide them, you know, in a good direction, that was really exciting.
Well, and honestly, like as someone who grew up in North Carolina, like, you know, I saw the Centennial Campus where that original Red Hat headquarters was before it existed, like when it was land, right? Yeah.
The thing that's interesting about that is like you look at someone who like approaches Red Hat in 2026 versus like then in like the very, very early 2000s.
It's like for me, the idea of like Red Hat being a company and not the community, they were like basically the same thing, right? Like you go to NC State Lug, Installfest, and there's Spot, right? of fedora fame just there helping everyone install stuff including helping me figure out problems with mine like and you see that and you hear the lore people talking about yeah the guy with the red hat like it's not just a company store there it's almost like kind of baked a little bit into the engineering architecture there but i mean also was there in 2002 so it was relatively fresh i have no idea anything about colleges in 2026 at all regardless where they're at but One of the pieces of content that you've created that I probably referenced more than a lot of other things out there is you gave a talk.
I got to start with Mandrake back in the day, and then I made my way into Gentoo because I wanted to optimize everything to the extent.
And I remember warming up my apartment in San Antonio during the wintertime, compiling something, either the kernel or KDE or something like that.
And then after that, You know, went through Ubuntu, went through a couple other ones.
And there was a while there where it was like maybe about three or four big ones.
It's not terribly far away from Red Hat stuff, which is what I was doing on the servers.
And so that's what got me really excited because I was like, wow, I can write scripts.
I've participated in, I think, was it the, I can't remember what it was called, like Fedora Council at one point.
And it was just so much fun to see people that wanted to propose fun things to do in Fedora to help communities we didn't even know existed.
And to be able to help out with that and guide them, you know, in a good direction, that was really exciting.
Well, and honestly, like as someone who grew up in North Carolina, like, you know, I saw the Centennial Campus where that original Red Hat headquarters was before it existed, like when it was land, right? Yeah.
The thing that's interesting about that is like you look at someone who like approaches Red Hat in 2026 versus like then in like the very, very early 2000s.
It's like for me, the idea of like Red Hat being a company and not the community, they were like basically the same thing, right? Like you go to NC State Lug, Installfest, and there's Spot, right? of fedora fame just there helping everyone install stuff including helping me figure out problems with mine like and you see that and you hear the lore people talking about yeah the guy with the red hat like it's not just a company store there it's almost like kind of baked a little bit into the engineering architecture there but i mean also was there in 2002 so it was relatively fresh i have no idea anything about colleges in 2026 at all regardless where they're at but One of the pieces of content that you've created that I probably referenced more than a lot of other things out there is you gave a talk.
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