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By day I am known as a Lead Site Reliability Engineer. Working in a close-nit engineering team that handles production availability for some of the Health and Fitness industries largest products.. By night I’m either hanging out with my Wife, playing Rocket League and supporting IRC clients from around the world at The-IRC Hosting Solutions.

This blog was originally started as a way for me to vent frustrations from the day-to-day crap that comes with being a helpdesk technician, and from the need to put the endless thoughts on some medium of some sort. I’d like to continue writing about my network and automation adventures, if I can remember to write down my thoughts…!

Since elementary school, I have always been interested in computers. It first started out as robotics, programming and building, learning how systems worked as they interacted together. Through middle school and high school, computers were how my friends and I connected, from the greatest game, to the trending thing to look up on the internet.

Through high school, I was fortunate in the ability to take computer programming and web design classes, they gave a taste of what computers could offer me. In college I breezed through my A+ classes, wanting more, taking my CCNA classes, I finally found a challenge.

2 years into community college, I found myself at a cross roads, I wanted more in life, I felt like I was going no where, so I used the resources my CCNA teachers had given, and looked up local jobs to try and get interview experience.

The first job I found was 10 minutes away in St. Charles, Illinois. A small company that seemed to have a great energy about it that specialized in managed services for small and medium businesses.

When I got through the first initial questionnaire that is sent to applicants, I went for an in person interview. The interview consisted of the President and Vice-President of the company asking me questions, I still remember it clearly like it was yesterday. The highest part of that day came after the interview, I was asked to stay for the week to see  if I could learn and pick up on things.. and I never looked back!

Today I am happy to report I have moved forward with my career. I am currently (6/2016) employed by a software firm that specializes in payment gateway services. From the day I had my interview, I knew there was something special about the company, and I am happy to say it’s one of the best decisions to come join them. I am one of a handful of Systems Engineers tasked with keeping our critical infrastructure online and up to date. We rely heavily on puppet to deploy updates to our servers, it’s an amazingly powerful tool that continues to push my interests in the automation world.

One of my passions is web technologies, I LOVE working with web technologies (web servers, DNS, web markup). I run a small (VERY small) internet company that does IRCd and Shell hosting that also controls and manages a streaming anime site at AnimeFTW.tv. The site is currently in its 4th revision, from graphical design to the content management system design. I developed the site back in 2007, as a way to combat the growing and rampant issues with low quality streaming anime. Since then, we have gone from a couple hundred users to over 230k members strong. The site was developed to be self sustaining, after about 2 years of paying all of the bills myself or in tandem with the co-founder (Gravy), we were able to make the site self sufficient. To this day, any excess cash flow is given back to those that have helped to sub the videos that are used on the site. The goal of the site is to someday go further and give all proceeds back to the creators of the anime in Japan as a thank you for the hard work (even if it’s a small amount..).

My daily proverb for being in IT is as follow;

“If you cannot take something away, either from having learned or being shown something new, you’re not doing something right. Information Technology presents so much information to us, that if you find yourself doing the same thing over and over, your doing it wrong.”

Thanks for reading!