Skip to content

About Me

Photo of Livia Lima

Hi! 🖐🏻 I’m Livia Lima — a Linux professional, open-source advocate, and recovering corporate IT person currently plotting my return to Canada.

I spent 15 years supporting IT infrastructure — networks, storage, application servers — at places like IBM, Dell, and a few companies you’ve probably never heard of. More recently, I went back to school in Ontario, earned a Canadian college credential in network administration, and briefly worked as a hands-on prototype technician. It was a great experience, and taught me that I enjoy soldering components as much as troubleshooting servers.

Through platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, and YouTube I share technical knowledge and resources with the broader community. I’m also the maintainer of the Linux Upskill Challenge, a free and open-source course that has helped 30,000+ learners around the world build confidence running a Linux server. I’m proud of that one.

Outside of technology, I enjoy music, craft beer, comic books and the occasional rugby match. I did crossfit for a while but today I keep the stress levels down with tea, the gym, and light hiking. Walking just helps me think.

Stuff I did that I’m proud of

I’m a member of the Linux Professional Institute, LPIC-1 certified, with a few other shiny badges on Credly if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s the human version of my CV:

I lead the Linux Upskill Challenge. It’s a free, open-source, month-long Linux server course that I’ve been maintaining since 2020. More than 30,000 learners have gone through it. I also created a companion YouTube series to go with it — 50,000+ views, 1.5k subscribers, and keeps growing. My goal has always been to make Linux less intimidating for people who want practical skills without paying for a bootcamp.

I surrounded myself with Cisco certified analysts by just… teaching people. Support life can be hard, and I wanted my peers to have better chances to grow. So I started teaching what I knew, writing training material, coaching people. The number of analysts who went from zero network experience to Cisco certified shot up 35% in two years. Many of them moved on to better jobs, and honestly, that’s one of the things I’m proudest of. I hope everyone who ever sat through one of my sessions is doing well.

I saved a major US bank $50k with a spreadsheet and a lot of coffee. Their network circuit and telephone line inventory was a mess — they were paying another company to manage a mess that didn’t need to exist. I noticed the pattern, I documented the waste, and I shared the findings. The other company does not like me very much. Apparently this is called “implementing efficient governance measures.” Who knew.

I merged two teams without burning the department down. Transitioning Voice support into the Network team could have been a disaster. The training and process work we had already put in place (remember that Cisco thing?) meant people weren’t completely lost when unfamiliar incidents started arriving. 20% efficiency improvement for the metrics people, significantly fewer panicked Slack messages for everyone else.

Where else to find me

If you appreciate what I do, you can buy me a coffee or become my GitHub sponsor.

But a shoutout on Mastodon or a recommendation/endorsement on LinkedIn will make me just as happy.

The opinions on this page are entirely my own and not those of any employer, past or present.