Before I was troubleshooting systems, I was building things with my hands. I spent years in carpentry, and before that, in process improvement. The work was different, but the questions that kept me interested were the same: What’s actually causing the problem? What depends on this? How can we make it work better?
Today, I support users on the Marine Corps enterprise network. A call might start with someone who can’t sign in or get their email, but solving it often means tracing the issue across accounts, devices, and services. I like following that trail until the symptoms finally make sense.
That curiosity follows me home. In my homelab, I’ve broken things, rebuilt them, and learned more from figuring out why they failed than I would have from a clean install. Through my side project, IT Odyssey, I’m turning that work into projects and explanations others can use.
I recently finished my degree in cloud computing, and I’m working toward cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering. I want to help build systems that people can understand, trust, and recover when something goes wrong. I’m still learning, and I expect I always will be. That’s a big part of why I chose this path.
Mission
I want to use my skills in troubleshooting, process improvement, and analytical thinking, and my passion for learning and innovation, to build reliable, secure systems that make other people's work easier.
Vision
I want to become the kind of engineer people trust with hard problems. Someone who sees how the pieces fit together, builds systems that hold up, and makes the work easier for the people around them. I want a career that keeps challenging me to grow, where the years I spent finding my way become part of what makes me good at the work.
Core Values
Continuous Learning
I would have been a professional student if I could. IT suits me because it never lets you coast. The tools keep changing, and the alternative to learning is irrelevance. I follow a question until I understand it well enough to use the answer. Seek always a new horizon.
Continuous Improvement
Learning changes me. Improvement changes the system. I taught myself Lean Six Sigma and applied it in a live warehouse, where small, steady changes added up to a very different operation. I want to bring that same habit to pipelines, infrastructure, and platforms.
Community & Collaboration
I do good work alone, but ideas get better with other people. I'm good at fanning someone's spark into a flame, and a little friendly competition brings out my best. Open source shows what happens when anyone can contribute. I also learn by teaching. Explaining something clearly takes real understanding, which is why I led labs and study groups in college, and why I document and share what I build through IT Odyssey.
Integrity
Do what you say and say what you mean. I don't deal in double talk or half truths. I ask direct questions because I'm curious, not because I'm challenging anyone, and I say plainly what I actually tested. When I get something wrong, I own it and learn from it.
The Long Way Here
Years ago, I was an inventory specialist, and I loved it. My first cycle count came in at 67% accuracy. My last one was 100%. Getting there meant digging through a SQL database to separate software bugs from user error, building a help desk ticketing system into the warehouse scanners, and helping the company go live on a web-based warehouse management system. Out of more than 500 people, I was one of about six who were comfortable with technology, and I taught myself on the job.
Then I climbed the wrong ladder. I chased warehouse management when what I actually loved was the technology work, and it took me years to see the difference. Along the way I went back to carpentry, listened to 72 audiobooks in a single year, and spent a long time asking myself what I would do if money were no object. The answer kept landing in the same place: solve complex problems and make other people's work easier. Technology was the field that asked for all of it.
So at 41, I went back to school. I earned my B.S. in Cloud Computing from WGU in 2026, along with a stack of certifications, a Proxmox homelab, and a disaster recovery project where I built an application with backups to AWS and proved I could restore it after the original environment was gone. It was the long road, and I'm glad I took it. It taught me patience, humility, and how to keep going when something worked yesterday and doesn't work today.
Building what's next
At home, my lab includes Linux servers, containers, monitoring, and a three-node Kubernetes cluster. I'm developing projects through IT Odyssey, including a tool that records terminal commands and the surrounding context so it's easier to answer a question every engineer has asked: What changed?
I'm also working deliberately on confidence with DevOps tools. I don't want to know a command only because I followed it in a tutorial. I want the muscle memory to build, troubleshoot, automate, and explain the system myself. That means writing scripts, deploying services, documenting what I learn, and going back when something doesn't make sense.
I'm actively looking for my next role in cloud, DevOps, or platform engineering: a place where I can contribute now, learn from strong engineers, and take on more responsibility as I grow.