From the NY Times:

Mr. Alexander is an American Israeli dual citizen who grew up in Tenafly, N.J.

In 2022, during his senior year of high school, he joined Garin Tzabar, which prepares young people from around the world to join the Israel Defense Forces. He moved to Israel to serve in the military after he graduated and was assigned to the infantry.

Mr. Alexander was stationed near the border with Gaza in September 2023

From another article, he said something like “why should I pay for the Israeli government’s mistake”. Sounds like this falls into the ‘just following orders doesn’t protect you’ category; not feeling a lot of sympathy.

Hah, yeah I got a Debian floppy and then tried to install packages over DSL. Somehow it didn’t immediately kill my interest in Linux, eventually ran OpenBSD as my server for a while.

If you haven’t played with Pulumi (for configuring cloud services) and Ansible (for local services, shell commands, apt installs etc) you may enjoy them as a way to capture / re-apply configuration.

I started messing with Linux, then became a developer. Whatever draws your interest!