I’m an 80’s kid who was a huge computer nerd growing up, only to become a professional computer nerd as an adult. I love tinkering and experimenting. I grew up in a Commodore household (C64/128, several Amigas), learned Windows out of an academic and professional necessity, and eventually found myself tinkering with Debian and a few other distributions in my late teens.

I spent about 7 years in the Networking world doing all things Cisco, which I thoroughly enjoyed until I was responding to alerts at 2 AM while trying to bottle feed my firstborn. During my time there I developed an intimate working knowledge of all things routing and switching (which has changed and evolved in some ways over the years, other ways not so much).

I spent about the next 7 years as a civil servant in the super boring, but super lucrative (compared to my previous reimbursement at the time) world of government acquisitions. The key takeaway from that time was that it gave me the opportunity to refine my ability to translate technical jargon into common language that targets managers and decision makers.

Since then I have been working for a series of defense contractors (my current employer is amazing) serving as an system administrator on the core infrastructure team for a series of software test systems. I do a lot of work with VMware products, Windows (client and server), RHEL (7, 8, and 9), Ubuntu, NetApp storage arrays, and a bunch of other fun stuff like Ansible (I could write YAML playbooks all day long and be happy) and lots and lots of STIG work. (Yuck, but it pays the bills!)

I’ve been doing that long enough that now I’m ‘the boss’ for the team of contractors supporting the ongoing work there. I spent a lot of time hiring and mentoring new talent coming in, trying to develop the next batch of mad computer scientists to take things to the next level.

I use Fedora on my laptop at home. I also have a small homelab setup where I run a few VMs. (I just finished moving everything at home from VMware to Proxmox as a learning/fun exercise.) I also do a bit of gaming in my spare time, but I’m at that point where I’m looking to put some of that time and energy back into something Good, so hopefully you’ll see me out and about somewhere in the Fedora community!