I’ve been working on updating my resume, and figured why not keep a living and breathing version live on the site. With that said, lets see what this looks like… (remember, the name of this site is ramblingman…)

Who am I?

I am a self-taught systems administrator and cloud infrastructure engineer (though those titles seem to change with the industry landscape), with more than 20 years experience across a wide variety of systems, technology and sectors. I have a passion for new and emerging technologies and identifying ways they can integrate into existing platforms to improve site availability, resiliency and efficiency. Basically, though, that’s just a long winded way to say… I love tech.

I began my fascination, essentially, in elementary school. Dad had invested in a family computer, a Tandy 1000 at the time. I remember we had the opportunity to upgrade it with some additional RAM. A whopping 640K of memory with dual 5.25 floppy drives. I had the opportunity to work through some of the tutorials that came with the computer. Things like how to format disks and stuff, it was neat and I was hooked.

A few years later and we’d upgraded to a 386SX, I remember my first modem; a 1200 baud which had a voice/data switch. You had to call the BBS on the phone itself and when it answered you’d flip the switch. Thus I entered the online world. I was barely connected, and with often disconnects due to call waiting or someone picking up a phone in the kitchen, but a whole new world had presented itself. I was a sponge. Early teens at this point, and I couldn’t get enough. Reading through various documentation, online news from the likes of Phrack, 2600, or Cult of the Dead Cow. It was my life. I was fortunate enough to eventually upgrade (some years later) to a 28800 modem from Practical Peripherals – ah the glory days.

Those were the early and formative years. That sponge mindset stayed with me as grew. A flash through high school. I had made some contacts through the BBS days and landed my first IT job. At 16, I was responsible for the import of an online inventory system being read in from reel-to-reel tape system. The company was a startup, MaxAir, and the role quite literally consisted of modifying the import filters to skip junk lines and restart the import process when it died.

These days I’ve moved on to more of a DevOps Engineering role. Our current production systems are deployed across both an on-premise and cloud solution, leveraging the best of both environments to ensure a fully functional, resilient customer facing platform.

Without going into specifics, we avoided a lift-and-shift model in favor of a service and consumption based solution. In my opinion it’s worked out well. I haven’t dived into Kubernetes yet, but mostly because I just haven’t. One of these nights I’ll find some time to deep dive in my local stack.

I currently work for a small but great company here in Wisconsin, happily employed with some extremely talented people in the financial services space.

I’ll keep this page updated as I go, but for now I think that gives a good background.

Cheers,
joey