How I Got Here

I learned to depend on myself. If nobody can help you build it or do it, you start figuring out how. That is a big part of how I approach technology, and how I ended up with the opinions you’ll find here.

Forged and hardened by fire and scar tissue is probably a fair description. I’m also an open book. I tend to give people my life story a little too easily, so here’s some of it before I start talking about infrastructure, machines, and the human condition.

A somewhat indirect start

I went to university with a partial scholarship. About two years in, I dropped out. I was making more money bartending and working in bars, and that was where my attention went.

Then I met the woman who would become my wife. She urged me to get a “day job,” which led to data entry at a law firm.

There are more stories in that stretch, but eventually I went back to school, earned a two-year associate degree, and picked up technical certifications. That led to an internship doing on-site IT support at an accounting firm.

The firm brought in an engineer from an IT consulting company for more complex work. I got to work alongside him on virtualization and storage projects. I wanted to soak up whatever I could, both about the technology we were using and about what was happening beyond our offices.

The manager wanted to hire me when the internship ended, but didn’t get the budget. The consulting engineer knew that before I did. He asked what my plans were, and I told him I hoped to get a job there. If that didn’t work out, he said, I should give him my résumé.

Building something I hadn’t done before

Three rounds of interviews followed. First, two of the consulting company’s four partners. Then the other two. Then the gauntlet of engineers.

They liked me and saw potential, but most of my experience was still school. They didn’t have an open project consulting role that fit me. What they did have was an MSP business they had been trying to get going.

They paired me with one of the partners and asked us to build that side of the house.

We started with maybe four or five customers who used us as supplementary IT support. We turned that into fully managed IT: user support, email, telephony, line-of-business applications, the lot. Yes, the email was on-premises back then.

Business picked up. Another person joined me, then I became the department manager, then more people came in. After about two years, we had something like twelve or fourteen full-service customers and a team of around four technicians and engineers, with the partner still heavily involved.

I hated doing less technical work as I did more managing.

I told the partners I felt I was on the wrong path. They asked me not to quit and to give them a little time. They came back with a proposal: leave the MSP unit, move into consulting engineering, and spend six months shadowing an engineer without having to worry about billing customers for that learning period.

The engineer they paired me with was the same one who had found me at the accounting firm.

Getting out of my comfort zone

That led into roughly six or seven years as a full-time, project-based consulting engineer. My specialties were enterprise storage and virtualization, but we didn’t stay neatly inside our specialties. If they thought you could handle something, you could find yourself running a massive project and learning a lot along the way.

I worked with hospital systems, casino chains, government offices, engineering and construction companies, and television and news studios. There were big-company IT teams, specialists, and executives to coordinate with. There were also small shops and people running a business on their own.

And holy crap, there was travel. Most of the US and some of Europe. Along the way, I also started teaching and certifying students and customers in a software suite for deploying and managing software-defined storage.

Mentoring runs through this part of my life. Someone made room for me to learn beside him, then helped me find my way into the work. Later, I got to share what I knew with other people. That matters to me, and it’s part of why I want to write here.

Finding the right fit again

Eventually the travel and uncertainty around work expectations became too much. My wife and I were foster parents. I started looking locally for work that fit my skills.

That brought me to a company in Louisville. Coming from consulting, I found the work constrained. Things moved more slowly than I was used to, and people tended to stay in their lanes. The corporate culture and career ladder weren’t a good fit for me.

I put some hooks out into my old working network.

One of the former consulting partners had left a couple of years before I did. He was the person I went to when a technical problem went beyond my mentoring engineer. Very sharp, and still an engineer at his core. By then, he was in technical leadership at another company.

My first four days there involved HR and getting started. Then I flew to Seattle for two weeks.

I designed, installed, and configured a 25/100 Gb switching backbone, installed the first two enterprise SANs, and stood up two complete hosting environments. That included infrastructure clusters, networking, storage, and hosting services that were new for the company. I also helped the team move from one cage to another in the colocation facility.

I came home for a couple of weeks, then went to London for similar infrastructure work.

That is a good place to stop the career chronology. The rest can live on a résumé. What I want to get into here is the work itself, what I learn from it, and the thinking that goes into it.

What keeps me interested

I still spend plenty of time building and experimenting at home. My homelab and home network support agentic work, working from home, family services, and all the IoT stuff that comes with a house. Keeping those uses working together, and keeping them appropriately separated, gives me plenty to dig into.

I’m a husband, a foster parent, a fan of building with bricks, and someone who loves being outdoors. I’m interested in context, knowledge, and technology, and in what happens when people and machines try to make sense of things together.

Expect infrastructure, tooling, AI experiments, and the occasional rant. I’ll share what I know, what I tried, and where I got it wrong. I want people to ask questions and push further into the details with me. Being open and accountable matters more to me than looking like I had every answer before I started.