👩🏽‍🚀 Works

My first job after dropping out of college was building Beowulf Clusters for Aspen Systems. Beowulf clusters are super computers used at places like national laboratories. During my 9 months there, I think I built the 5th or 6th fastest computer on earth at the time. It was back-breaking labor. Literally taking 1U servers out of a box, throwing them on a bench, filling them with components, testing the hardware, configuring and burning them in, and eventually PXE booting an image on them. The PXE stuff was pretty cool to me back then. That and IPMI were things I had never used before when setting up servers. But at that point, I was finally able to put "Build and Configure Linux Servers" on my resume, despite having been doing it for years at that point.

I eventually left that place and got a job working for a guy who interviewed there. He hired me to be a Sys Admin at this rinky dink casino. Actually 3 casinos, but that's just because of the weird property lines and licenses, it was basically just 1 IBM AS400 mainframe. I liked that part, and I liked most of the people who worked there, and I enjoyed the commute, and I finally got my own healthcare and met my best man there. It was also my first experience with our nation's unemployment system, and how crooked and political corporations can be. I found out like a year later that they cut half the employees because they were trying to cover all the money the GM had embezzled over the years. I guess she stole from the company and the customers, last I heard she was on trial for it, but who knows what happened.

I was only out of the workforce for like a month or two when I got offered my dream job. It was absolutely meant to be and perfect timing because I had recently broke up with my girlfriend, moved into a room of a house owned by a very nice couple, who were nothing but happy for me when I told them the news. I got to become a Sys Admin again, but like a very junior one, basically a printer fixer, gopher, and tech support, but I didn't care because it was at Copper Mountain Ski Resort. My boss, who I still think fondly of from time to time, told me: "To ski every day." As if he knew that my time there was short, because it was. 6 months in and the company filed for chapter 11, and cut half the staff, but not before I crossed the centennial mark for ski days in a single season. It was magnificent. They brought me back briefly over the summer, and I think he was setting me up to rejoin the team without promising it to me, but I never did.

Living in the mountains was, and continues to be a dream of mine, ever since moving back. I met some of the finest people there. I made some of my best friends there. I have memories, and stories that I could not have had any other way. 3 years is all it was, but it was memorable. Once I traded a website for a ski pass. Eventually opportunity came knocking again, and I basically spent my last 18 months doing anything and everything one of my 100+ small business customers might request from an IT guy. Finally I had become a guy who legitimately built and maintained servers. I could finally put my skills I learned as a child on my resume.

I remember the day I made the choice to leave the mountains. I was driving, and I was thinking about where my life was going, and how difficult I had it living in such an expensive place with such a low salary, and I figured that if I went down to the city I could make double what I was making and buy a home and start a family and afford to bring my family up to the mountains to enjoy them on the weekends, since weekends were basically all I had anyway since my job was so demanding. I rarely got to snowboard during the week, and even if I could, I chose not to because it just wasn't as convenient as it was at Copper. I was totally and properly spoiled living and working basically a hundred yards from the chairlift. I worked mostly in the towns of Vail, Avon, and Edwards so like a 5-10 minute drive to the base of Beaver Creek, and that was too inconvenient for me. But really just felt like it wasn't worth it, because by the time you're all geared up, you got time for maybe 1-2 quick runs before the lunch hour is over, and the team sort of frowned on it.

So began my career as I know it today. I was a Sr. Linux guy at a medium-sized photography company, then went on to deploying 911 systems for city of Memphis, and then the State of Colorado, before it ended abruptly out of my control. I was pretty salty about that one, but I bounced back, and did a stint at a fintech company, before going on to another government role that again was short-lived. Seems like God just doesn't want me helping the government, and as of writing this in 2021 I see why. Then an Oil n Gas SaaS startup, before moving on to a home security company. I was able to learn a lot throughout these years, and basically stayed on the bleeding edge of technology the whole way. I even started contributing to that bleeding edge in the form of open source software and ecosystem design, some of which can be found here.I took those skills and pioneered some CI/CD implementations. This ended putting me back into software development which I thought I had left behind in school. I didn't pick it back up out of interest, but out of necessity. It just became too much to manage things at scale any other way. So that's what I've been doing ever since along with my own businesses. I actually really enjoy writing software again, and I think I'm going to continue doing it. My light resume is here. And my Dark resume is here.