Valve 3 · slate line
Thirty years in IT, one job at a time.
Follow the line from 1994 down to today. Each stop is a job, a few of the things I got to build or fix there, and the tools I was using at the time. Prefer the short version? It lives on LinkedIn.
1990 to 1994
La Jolla High · NMSU · San Diego Mesa · Colorado State
High school in La Jolla, then a lap around three colleges in three states. I was already the kid people called when the computer misbehaved. The job was about to find me.
1994
Computer City · Denver, then San Diego
My first job in IT. I dropped out of college and took a job as a sales associate at a computer superstore, starting in the Denver store and then transferring to the one in San Diego, where the rest of this story picks up.
Nov 1994 to Jul 1996
Networks Plus Technology Group · San Diego
Next stop: networks. I sold, installed and supported Novell NetWare networks, which taught me that selling is the easy part and keeping it running is the career.
Jul 1996 to Nov 2001
Ubrandit.com · San Diego
Five years, one company, and a website that grew up. What started as the company's web presence turned into a global investment portfolio tracker, and I kept the lights on through two public listings (OTCBB, then AMEX). There is a photo of listing day in My World.
Oct 2001 to Mar 2002
Peregrine Systems · San Diego
A lab with 240 servers and one person who was supposed to keep them all sane. Short stay, big room.
Mar 2002 to Jun 2002
NMCI-ISF, SPAWAR · San Diego
Three months, three shifts, and a great many boxes. I led the staging line for the Navy's NMCI rollout: three team leads, 120 MCSE technicians, and a very large pile of hardware.
Jun 2002 to Mar 2006
Linspire, Inc. · San Diego
A Linux desktop company, which meant I ran IT for people who cared a great deal about what was on the desktop. I owned the whole stack: network, firewall, intranet, WiFi, disaster recovery, and the people who answered the phones.
May 2006 to Nov 2012
onTargetjobs, Inc. (now DHi) · Centennial, CO
Six and a half years, and the place I really learned virtualization. I moved dev, QA and production onto VMware, built a DR site, then built a whole new data center and moved everything into it. Along the way seven companies in the US and Canada became one data center, one domain and one email system. We also made a lip dub.
Nov 2012 to Aug 2013
Monigle Associates · Denver
A short, busy stop where the servers and the websites finally lived in the same job. VMware underneath, Ubuntu LAMP on top, and sites moving through dev, QA, staging and prod.
Aug 2013 to Oct 2015
CoBiz Financial · Denver
Banking: the land of change control, escalation paths and tape rotations. I converted the Hyper-V environment to VMware with SRM, rebuilt backup on Veeam and Data Domain, and moved the file shares off NetApp to Windows DFS on EMC. Remote office visits meant a lot of driving through Colorado and Arizona.
Oct 2015 to Apr 2017
eBags, Inc. · Denver
E-commerce, where downtime is measured in lost orders. I designed and ran vSphere across three data centers, moved the Hyper-V machines over, and kept several Active Directory forests healthy.
May 2017 to Nov 2024
Maverick Wine Company · Denver
The big rebuild. Old systems out, a new data center in, built from the rack up: routers, firewalls, switches, vSphere, Active Directory, DFS, backup, DR and monitoring. Then I moved the ERP, the file servers and the websites in, and email from G Suite to Microsoft 365. I also wrote the delivery routing platform the company used for seven-plus years, from scratch.
Feb 2022 to today You are here
City of Centennial · Office of Technology and Innovation
Where the line currently runs. I design the backup strategy, keep VMware and the SAN healthy, run Active Directory and Microsoft 365, mentor junior IT staff, and write down what I did so the next person does not have to guess.
Everything that has been on my bench, grouped by drawer.
Want to talk shop? Press the intercom, or find me on LinkedIn.