I’m an engineer by curiosity, weightlifter by passion, and amatuer cook by necessity. Currently working in Chicago.

My career started by tinkering with old PCs to play games (WoW, Counterstrike, and Warcraft III) by figuring out how to add/remove components (lots of trial and error!). Then attending DePaul university taking their Network Engineer program and building out networks and gaining operational experience with routing, switching, and firewalls in downtown Chicago. Currently working in the video game industry. I’ve engineered and maintained a healthy infrastructure stack, been apart of shipping many AAA games, and get to work with an amazing game studio. During this time I’ve moved more to the systems and devops side of the house. I have a strong preference for open source and linux!

Skilled in Networking, Infrastructure, Systems, Source Control, CI/CD, Storage, Automation, and Information Security in both on-prem and cloud environments.

🏠 Home Lab 🔧

The home lab has changed alot over the years from a single laptop to multiple win/nix blade servers, VMware Workstation Pro, VirtualBox, Vagrant, ESXi clusters with vSAN, and Raspberry Pi’s.

Right now the network infra is UPS/PDU backed with EdgeMax Router, Cisco C3850, and Ubiquiti WAP for wireless. Route/Switch are configured via ansible and the servers are running on a ESXi host (RHEL8, Ubuntu, and Fedora) boxes. The Ubuntu hosts are running a k3s cluster driven by a gitops monorepo - home-ops.

The rest of my labbing is on an AWS ☁️

Certifications

I’ve always been a fan of a getting certs to kick start my knowledge in a specific domain. Doing so has immensely helped learn the language/tool/technology quickly. In addition to balancing my study time between books on the subject and home lab projects. Below is the list of certs I’ve obtained during those studies:

• CKA: Certified Kubernetes Administrator
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
• NetApp Certified Data Administrator, ONTAP
• Cisco Certified Network Associate Routing and Switching (CCNA)
• PCNSA - Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Administrator
• ACE - Palo Alto Networks Accredited Configuration Engineer PAN-OS
• Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner