About Me
Professional
After graduation, I enlisted into the Navy where I served for 5 years as an Aviation Ordnanceman. My time in the service taught me a great deal about cooperation, leadership and ingenuity. Completing two RIMPAC exercises and a deployment with VFA-151, I was lucky enough to see a great deal of the world that I otherwise would not have been able to. From the gorgeous snow-covered vista's in South Korea to the beautiful beaches of Singapore, I truly was lucky to get out of the country and experience so many distinct cultures. My responsibilites were pretty broad, as I filled a few different billets. My main responsibilities were the safe handling of ordnance and countermeasures for the F/A-18E. During my time, I collected several qualifications outside my "purview". R&C Team Leader being the main one, which is a series of checks performed to ensure the everything works properly and talks to each other as it should. I also spent a decent amount of time in the Corrorsion Control workcenter, working odd hours and performing corrosion prevention and maintenance. We also were in charge of pain touch-ups, as well as custom paints for the "show bird".
At the culmination of my service, I returned to my homestate of Washington to attend college. Attending Tacoma Community College, I completed the Associates of Arts and Science in Information Technology. With the building blocks of my education done, I started a rudimentary homelab (it was just two virtual machines on my painfully slow computer at the time) I started building and breaking my own network for practice. During this time the Pandemic hit, so there was considerably more time to practice and I started looking in to extending my skills to development. Poking at Python and Rust here and there, learned enough to write some very rudimentary programs at that point. Close to the end of the pandemic, I started at my first MSP. This was quite the experience, and I'd liken it to "drinking from a firehose". After a year, it was obvious to me I just wasn't ready. I didn't feel I had the skills needed, so I sought employment elsewhere. I used this break in technical employment to further solidify key skills, as well as pick up on new ones. This was when I started experimenting with moving to Linux full time, and I've not looked back since.
During that 1 year break, I saw my technical proficiency skyrocket. Even with the steep learning curve for my distro of choice, continuous effort and tinkering has rewarded me with skills and a way of thinking about technical problems that I just don't believe I'd have gained in a similar amount of time. Having to troubleshoot everything from fundamental compatibility issues (thanks WINE!), graphical errors, driver issues for audio software and more - the hiccups were many and the road long. In my previous position, understanding Linux / Unix and being familiar with the command line allowed me to automate processes that would take techs a few hours down to a quick script run. The largest benefit by far is the increase in comfort with the command line, which translated in comfort in (safe) experimentation with ExchangeOnline Powershell and MgGraph for scripting purposes. After a year, I re-entered the MSP field at another local MSP.
During my time at my most recent employer, my responsibilities were multi-facted. We provided white-glove service - with prompt and polite assistance being the brand. I learned much in this position, from Microsoft 365 Administration to virtualizing existing servers, SSO and Federated login management, Domain records management, BCDR management and more. We'd sometimes partner with an onsite IT staff, in which case we were their escalation point. One of the more involved projects I completed during my time here was a change between IT vendors - where a client was leaving their current IT and utilizing us as their provider. Their outgoing provider reportedly "customized" their Windows ISO, and forbade us from modifying it or the equipment that was on loan. This presented several unique challenges:
- they would also not describe the changes made to the Windows install
- All devices had to be returned in their current condition
- The devices had no access to the disk drive
- The client was in a crunch period and could afford very little, if any downtime
Among others, these were the most complex to work around. In discussions with the client, we were able to direct them to newer devices instead of replacing with like ones. With access to the drives on the new devices - our solution was to utilize the dd command in Linux to bulk copy the drives. Over a weekend, this resulted in migrating the old devices over to the new ones. Time-consuming sure, but ready by Monday with no visible downtime to the client and most importantly, it was a safe movement because we took our time. Each migration was completed with no data loss, and set us up very nicely for the next project of theirs, which was migrating their server into SharePoint and getting them set up fully in Azure AD and SharePoint.
Personal
Beginning all the way back when I first played Diablo 2 for the first time, I knew I was going to work with computers in some capacity. Once I saw the flames move on the title screen, I was hooked when it came to computers. Learning all I could through my teen years, we didn't have much in the way of availablilty for parts so it lead to some creative problem solving to get programs and later games to run. This ultimately culminated in me "frankensteining" two computers together in order to play Diablo 3 on release, which "worked" in the sense that it ran the game...but shortly after worked no longer. This ended up being an expensive lesson in making sure everything is supported with each other parts wise.
Outside of work I'm normally practicing my development skills, reading a book, listening to a book or otherwise engaged with one of the two communities I assist in running. Both centered around Warhammer 40K, one is centered around the Salamanders and the other is the associated community hub. The Salamanders are my main focus, totalling over 1400 people on multiple continents - communication and patience is the name of the game. I've been a member of this community for over a year (and less than 100 people), and could not be prouder of how far we have come. Originally centered around one of the IPs, we've since expanded to cover the Salamanders in general as they're easily some of the coolest (I may be biased here) in the world of 40K. This is actually the genesis of my longest running project and one I plan on iterrating on here soon - my Req_bot project. It's entirely built in Python, and mostly just serves to quick scale for events and heavy traffic days. It's also been a fun "game" to play with the members, with different features being promised at different membership goals. The next couple steps are to integrate an AI agent so it's more interactive, with the plan to use the Gemini wrapper I created as part of my developer course. The next feature after that is an Opt-in music player, which is going to be interesting to see how cross site streaming like that works. This is an aspect of the project I'm really excited about, as it means I can continue to tailor and grow it as my communities needs grow.
I currently am following the boot.dev developer course, which has made actually sticking to the lessons a lot easier than doing it solo. There's just enough structure and freedom to where it suits my needs very well. In fact, this entire site started as one of their projects! With a focus on Python and GO, it's felt like a natural and easy to understand compliment to my current experience with Bash and PowerShell. Currently they offer Backend Dev courses, which is the track I'm following. There are plans to release a DevOps course - which is entirely more my speed. One of my favorite aspects of working in IT has been the networking side of the house, and making things "talk" to each other. DevOps, with a focus on automation and deployment, feels like a natural progression of my interests and ultimately one of two end goals for my career.