My journey didn't start in a data center. It started with pizza ovens, welding torches, and broken machines.
I wasn't born into technology. By the time I was 14, I was already working odd jobs. At 17, I started making pizzas and eventually managed two stores. It wasn't glamorous, but it taught me responsibility and how to keep things running under pressure.
During summers in high school, I worked in HVAC. I later became an ASE-certified auto mechanic, then got my CDL for tractor-trailers—but that wasn't for me either.
In the early '90s, I joined the Army as a helicopter repairer. Though my service was cut short by an injury, it taught me discipline, structure, and technical systems.
After that came construction and welding. I worked my way up over nearly a decade, eventually becoming a certified structural welder leading crews on serious projects. It was honest work—tough, dangerous, and exacting.
Long before I ever touched enterprise hardware, I was neck-deep in the early days of home computing. I owned some of the first machines regular people could get their hands on—the Apple II, Sinclair 1000, TRS-80, and Commodore 64.
I wanted computing power so badly that I traded my early '80s Fox Body Mustang for an Apple IIc and a 1974 Ford F-150 Ranger. Some people wanted horsepower—I wanted processing power.
As the world moved toward Windows and IBM-compatibles, I made the transition too. I started building and tweaking PCs, learning how every part worked. When the Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz processor came out, I managed to overclock it by 25%—a rare achievement at the time.
That was the beginning. No classes. No certifications. Just an obsession with understanding how computers worked, and a constant drive to go further.
What I didn't have in formal schooling, I made up for with curiosity. While working in trades, I was quietly building something else—a future in computers. I had no roadmap. No degree. No connections.
But I had broken computers—lots of them.
On trash days, I'd drive around picking up discarded monitors and desktops. I turned my dad's basement into a makeshift repair lab, learning how machines worked by breaking them first. I taught myself everything through hands-on trial and error.
I started fixing systems for friends, then strangers. Before long, I had a small home business with around 120 customers—all word-of-mouth and newspaper ads.
At one point, I signed up for an advanced DOS class. After the first hour, the instructor asked me to teach it. I declined—not because I couldn't, but because I still felt like I had more to learn.
In 2004, I made the leap into corporate IT. My first role was supporting a desktop team doing basic upgrades and hardware swaps. But the more I saw, the more I absorbed.
I started supporting specialized workstations for scientists, interfacing with their lab equipment, then moved into infrastructure, servers, and backup systems.
That job lasted nearly a decade. I went from a contractor to a full-time employee, and from an outsider to the person people leaned on when the system needed saving.
From there, I took on a series of contract roles across industries—real estate, retail, finance, telecom. No two environments were the same, but they all had one thing in common: they needed someone who could walk in, make sense of the mess, and quietly make things work again.
On my first day at a global tech firm, they had a critical storage outage. They were flying in a high-level expert from overseas. I wasn't allowed to touch anything, so I just watched.
Inside the data center, something caught my eye—every fiber module had a faint red light, except one. That's all I needed to see.
Seven hours later, that expert was stumped. When leadership asked for an update, I spoke up. I swapped out the dead GBIC with one from an unused port. The system came up immediately.
A domain change once triggered a backup system failure so bad that the data appeared completely lost. The vendor declared it unrecoverable after an investigation. The organization paid nearly $70,000 to be told their data was gone.
I wasn't convinced. Over the next few days, I went line-by-line through roughly 80,000 entries, mapping it all back by hand. The result? Full recovery. Nothing lost.
The vendor said it wasn't supposed to be possible. They offered me a job. I stayed where I was.
A network card died in a virtualized environment. The replacement hardware didn't match. VMware wasn't having it. IDs were scrambled. Interfaces no longer lined up.
Most people would've rebuilt the host. I manually remapped every identifier in every config file until the system believed it had never changed.
No rebuild. No downtime. Just one more fire put out quietly.
"I watch everything. I catch problems before most people notice them. I solve what others call unsolvable. And I do it not because I want to prove something—but because I genuinely care."
Today, I earn well. I manage critical systems. I sit in meetings that should've been emails. But I don't need a title. I don't need recognition. I just want the systems to work.
I'm not a manager by ambition. I'm the guy in the background who makes sure everyone else can do their job.
That's what I do. That's what I've always done.
I believe in maintaining strict control over my own privacy and operational security. On all personal systems, camera access is physically blocked or electronically disabled at all times. Microphones are permitted only for necessary audio communications, such as remote meetings.
This reflects a personal commitment to protecting privacy and minimizing unnecessary exposure, a standard I uphold consistently across all my devices.