About Me

A bit about my life path so far. I grew up in Virginia, and since my parents got divorced when I was about two years old, I had the opportunity when I got older to visit Germany to see how my dad lived. Seeing another country and culture was a great experience during the summers in Germany. It really helped give a second perspective of how others in the world live and that there is no “One right way”. I went to college after high school instead of taking a year off.

After college, I began in IT as a Help Desk Administrator before moving into Application Administration. After 12 years, I decided to make a change into system deployment as an Application Engineer, which I have been doing for 7 years now. I have always had an interest in automating manual tasks and making improvements to current processes. The first project I remember working on was a simple blog type interface for my sister to use during one of her trips. The project was very crude to today’s standards, but I felt it was an improvement for the use case my sister had back around 2002 to 2004. She was going on a trip and would have limited access to internet, but wanted to be able to post regular comments to her website for friends to read without having to spend a lot of time formatting blog type posts. In the end, I created a password protected PHP form, which would take a title and content form data and saved to a text file. Then There was a single PHP page that read the text file and formatted with a very simple formatting. Later on, I would realize I had come up with my own implementation of something like XML and a simplified version of a blog content management system.

Another early on project as an intern was to develop from scratch an intranet and then create an employee photo directory page. I realized manually updating the alphabetical list of employees and their photos was going to be a maintenance nightmare. Again sometime around 2003, I created a similar PHP page that would read a text file, which included department, employee name, and photo file name. This script had a similar tag structure to dynamically generate the employee photo page and in order to add or remove a person, all that needed to be done was to add or remove the corresponding line from the text file.

A recent example was in about 2023, I had the need to verify 100+ linux devices had been updated and specific configuration was successfully completed on each device. I saw that this verification would be useful to be able to run multiple times over the course of a few months. I realized the deployment automation tool Ansible was being used for deploying an operating system update, so I focused on learning how Ansible worked and then built a script that could be deployed to each device. The script would run on each device to collect the data points required and then Ansible was able to bring the data back to the central server and compile all of the data for all 100+ devices into a single .csv report to help identify which devices still needed to be updated or configurations changed. The 100+ devices were able to be audited within 2 to 3 minutes saving a huge amount of time avoiding having to log in to each device and manually checking for the configurations.