About

This site is a personal blog for documenting projects I’m currently working on and to serve as a sort of portfolio. This means that the target audience is a bit of a mixed bag leading to some interesting changes in tone. Sometimes it will be a little dry and technical while some pages will have personal experiences, anecdotes, phrases, etc. tossed in.

Of note is Hugo, the Static Site Generator used to create the site and the incredible work put into the Relearn theme.

I’m barely scratching the surface on what both projects are capable of so go take a look at what they can do.

Content

The content is primarily a mixture of three things.

1. Projects are larger and more long-term items I’m working on. They’ll vary from simple spin-up proof of concepts to items I plan on keeping around indefinitely.
2. Tools are items that I find handy but I don’t plan on providing any meaningful information on.
3. Environments & Standards gives a brief overview of the on-prem and cloud environments along with the standards I try to adhere to.
4. My Resume for anyone interested.

About Me

Early Days

I’ve been a tech enthusiast for most of my life with some of my earliest memories being my father turning on his home PC, it making the most amazing beeping, dialing and chirping sounds, and text slowly painting across the screen as he worked. Computers were fascinating and they could play games. Just pop in the 5.25" floppy, type A: followed by (typically) run.exe and lose yourself in hours of fun.

A fun story is the event that got me into computers. The PC was running Windows 95 and I wanted to install a game (most likely Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness) but there wasn’t enough space. I started poking around, decided that all of these files in C:\Windows\System32 were never used and deleted all that I could. Dad wasn’t exactly thrilled when he got home and, since I broke it, I would be the one to fix it. He handed me the Windows 95 installation media, the manual and told me to get it working. I eventually sorted it out and that was the genesis of me becoming a “computer guy”.

IT Employment

Computers remained a tool primarily for fun through my late teens until I was able to break out of the manual labor market in 2006 as a QA/Customer Service rep at Total Computing Solutions. They were a small organization with their flagship product being a college bookstore retail product built on the Pick Operating System (also known as Reality, ADDS, IBM Universe, U2, D3… it’s an interesting read). It was a completely different computing world of telnet, text terminals, serial devices, tape drives and thin clients - quite the deviation for someone who baaaarely remembered MS-DOS and cut their teeth on GUI based applications.

TCS knew their product was showing its age and I came on as they were making moves to modernize it. The cloud was really becoming a thing and they knew they needed to shift away from the single sale, self-hosted model to a cloud first, recurring revenue model. They had a new GUI application and a plan was under way on how to convert to a SaaS solution and man was it a fun (and sometimes frustrating) challenge. Telnet was replaced with SSH (or tunneled through secure VPN connections), device connectivity moved from serial to USB, and a unique data failover technique developed so when the internet went down the cash registers could still operate independent of the cloud server.

Over the years I took on more and more responsibilities. I started doing software installs and customer deployments, backups, server administration, network administration, etc. until I was the primary on all non-PICK technologies. I created support and how-to videos, a public facing knowledge base and wore multiple hats. It made for interesting days when you’re fielding customer support questions, coordinating with the director of auxillary services on a brand new store build out and planning after-hours patch maintenance.

I stayed with TCS through the purchase by Zumasys Inc. in 2019 where I went from one of nine employees to one of around seventy five. This acquisition became an incredible growth opportunity for me. I was introduced to Azure for the first time when I migrated the TCS SaaS solution to Azure. I became familiar with Office 365 and the comprehensive (PDF warning) licensing options. Microsoft Hybrid Identity, Intune, Microsoft Defender, VMware vSphere clusters, Nimble SAN, Meraki and Fortinet network appliances - all sorts of incredible stuff.

Multiple companies were acquired during my tenure and it was quite the melting pot of users, processes, products and systems which all needed sorting out. One acquisition in particular became the new flagship product, a manufacturing ERP solution, that needed some work to make it a cloud-first product. It was very reminiscent of the cloud conversion work done previously at TCS and it was a blast working with the developers solving problems on how the underlying infrastructure would work, our design options to get around certain pain points and deploy it at scale with containers, WebApps, serverless compute, storage, etc.

Another fun focus was optimization. An hours long install process for each TCS cash register was automated into a single PowerShell script and ~5 minutes of custom configuration. Disaster recovery of the SaaS environment was streamlined so failover happened in seconds, not hours. New customer hosting deployments in Azure were standardized around a set of network, compute and monitoring solutions all centrally managed and deployed via a PowerShell script and Bicep templates. Everything was documented with new policies and procedures covering the product lifecycle: onboarding a new customer, customizing the deployment, common troubleshooting steps, the update processes, all the way through to decommissioning.

Zumasys also provided the opportunity to go beyond my regular IT duties and interact at the business management level. Creating cost analysis reviews and projections allowed us to make decisions on where to focus development efforts to reduce costs and improve our standardized deployments. Writing business policies and procedures, creating system standards, performing user security training and completing after action reports improved my soft skills and broadened my understanding of how IT can benefit a company in so many ways beyond simple system deployment and maintenance.

Sabbatical

In early 2023 I took the opportunity to take a year off, have some fun and casually complete some IT certifications. The break has been great, the year is up and now I’m getting back into the workforce.