About

It started with a bet.

A 15-year-old, hopelessly addicted to Counter-Strike 1.5, and a dad who pinched pennies, absolutely convinced our entry-level Compaq was good enough. Maybe it's cheaper if I build it myself, I thought, and I was right. Through willpower, determination and an mwave.com (a now-defunct Newegg competitor) "yard sale", I was able to build a decent gaming PC that crashed once an hour, for under $300. It's been off to the races since.

Today, as IT System Administrator at Vast, I run a mixed Linux, Windows and macOS fleet of more than 2,000 devices, build secure, compliant infrastructure in AWS GovCloud and GCP with Terraform, and write the internal tools that sit on top of it.

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The details.

In today's environment, what is most valuable? Does anyone really know? One thing is for sure, AI is changing what an IT team looks like. Tools now take on much of the narrow, repetitive work that used to justify a separate specialist for each layer, and the work that stays needs people who can follow a problem from the device to the cloud to the code. That is the kind of work I do.

Systems: Tie A to B. Oh wait, we need Z too! The skillset is varied. The patience required is high. The documentation? Limited. Thinking in systems is paramount, and it's the only way to make the most of today's tech. From e-commerce to aerospace, with an engineer with the confidence to make something out of nothing, the sky is the limit.
Cloud Infrastructure: I work across AWS, including GovCloud, Azure and GCP. Working in Aerospace, I've experienced the pressure of meeting compliance requirements, designing CMMC and FIPS-compliant architecture using infrastructure as code, zero-trust security, hybrid cloud networking, storage, monitoring and disaster recovery. Business needs require flexibility and speed so teams are unblocked and productive.
DevOps: I build the pipelines that ship Docker images to Artifactory, deploy to Kubernetes with Helm and ArgoCD, apply Terraform through Spacelift, and monitor it all with Grafana and PagerDuty. My motto has always been, 'Make it so easy, your grandma can deploy it'. Reducing friction and reducing complexity is my idea of fun.
Software: I built a macOS CI runner platform in Go and TypeScript, from the PostgreSQL data model and REST API to its deployment, plus a self-service Active Directory password portal. Before that I integrated marketplace APIs with an inventory platform.