About Me

Platform Engineer | Systems Architect | SRE | Linux Evangelist

Self-motivated, passionate, and incredibly curious automator with 30 years of full-stack software engineering and 22+ years of infrastructure/systems engineering experience. I am constantly growing, evolving, and improving. My curiosity and innovation thrive on the cutting edge, but my seasoned experience anchors my solutions to the boringly-stable.

The Challenge

The industry is saturated with specialists who have followed predictable career trajectories. This has created a shortage of engineers who can bridge multiple technical domains and understand both granular technical details and broader architectural implications across traditionally siloed disciplines.

What I Bring

I bring three decades of cross-domain expertise spanning the entire software engineering ecosystem—from low-level systems programming and infrastructure automation to application development and enterprise architecture. This breadth enables me to identify solutions and optimize systems in ways that specialists confined to a single domain cannot.

I thrive in high-pace, rapidly evolving environments that require continual learning and absorbing large amounts of information. I really enjoy identifying abstract connections, which has served me well in time-sensitive, high-pressure situations where understanding the underlying root cause quickly can mean the difference between a minor incident and a major outage.

In my experience, in order to truly know what a tool does well, you must first understand what it does not do well.

My Greatest Strength

I have an insatiable drive to solve complex challenges. My greatest strength is not merely my current knowledge or prior experience, but my ability to quickly grasp new concepts and learn anything by diving into the deep end and mucking around, and then bringing order out of chaos. I come alive when given the opportunity to automate mundane, repetitive tasks and thrive in continually evolving environments or with frequent change.

What I Don't Do Well

I struggle with the mundane, routine maintenance period that comes after implementing a streamlined, efficient system and can't help seeking out problems to solve. I'm probably not the best tool for the job if you're looking for someone to simply maintain and operate stable, predictable systems without innovation or evolution... though I would love to build them for you.

Early Career

• Built my first website at 11, on a legal pad...in my bathroom... four years after the birth of the Internet. Two years later, we got dial up.
• At 17 I was writing HL7 (medical data exchange) protocols, and modified/supported data entry systems built in MS DOS-based FoxPro 2.1
• At 19 I accepted a position as Windows Network Administration/SysAdmin of a small office, solely responsible for 2 domain controllers (Windows 2000, 2003), 11 work stations, and a Checkpoint firewall. Fun fact: I renamed the domain admin username to "Deoxyribonucleic" - obviously more secure (security through obscurity ftw)
• Launched and ran a computer repair and IT Consulting company for five years (managing up to five employees at one point) named TACC Support (Technicians Against Computer Cruelty)

Homelab

I have a really nice homelab that serves as a safe non-production playground to learn, explore, and experiment on:

All hardware cherry-picked off eBay for cost-effective high-performance computing.

Contact Information

Let's Connect

Open to exciting opportunities in Platform Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Site Reliability Engineering, and Systems Design

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References available upon request