My Education and Work History:

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Appalachian State University (1991-1996)

→ I attended Appalachian State University, in the mountains of North Carolina. → I majored in Computer Science with minors in both Math and Business. What can I say, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. See for yourself: Webcam from ASU's campus Other High-Country webcams

Northern Telecom (1994 - 1998)

Tekelec (1998 - 2019)
(acquired by Oracle in 2015)

→ I started as an entry level Test Engineer in 1998 and within five years, I worked my way up to Senior Test Engineer. → I was always given the most challenging assignments, performance demos with our largest customers, certification activities with foreign governments, low level protocol validation, etc. I absolutely loved these challenging opportunities. → I architected test environments and planned out automation for our most complex manual test configurations. After a few years as an architect and team lead, I officially began my journey into leadership. → I moved from team lead, to manager, and ultimately senior director of the Test Engineering and Automation organization. As director, I was responsible for five products, a tools and automation team, and a global team of 120+ engineers in India, China, Czech Republic, and the United States. Several years into my role of Director of Test Engineering, Tekelec was acquired by Oracle (2015)and the environment became extremely political. As a result, I decided to try my hand at Operations as a lead engineer and architect. I was responsible for creating a framework that would simplify the onboarding process for customers into our new cloud native platform. This included creating pipelines and terraform scenairos that would automatically setup critical infrastructure and user accounts in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. I also created a new process for configuring and maintaining external "Network Perimeter" cloud resources. Having gained some experience in Site Reliability Engineering, I decided to move away from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and on to a company that was using more widely accepted cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). After twenty-one years at the same company, this was a huge decision for me, but... Citrix, here I come.

(2019 - 2021)

My transition to Citrix has been full of adventure. For my entire career I had worked a small town, Morrisville, but Citrix is located in the heart of downtown Raleigh. Citrix also happens to be less than a mile from where my grandparents grew up (in Boylan Heights), so just going to work every day (before CoVID hit in March 2020) was an awesome experience. I jumped in as a manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Citrix. The product I was responsible for is csomposed of over a hundred services with a presence in multiple cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and GCP. All configuration management was done in Ansible (although I also now introduced and implemented Terraform here as well), and the organization was transitioning from Operations -> DevOps -> SRE. There was a lot of new content to learn, so I dug in and quickly came up to speed on all of the technologies and what it really means to be an SRE. I enjoyed all the new experiences Citrix has brought to my life. While I had hoped that Citrix would be where I would close out my career, I realized that managing a file sharing application (just like DropBox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc), was not the legacy I wanted. After two years of dedication to Citrix, I decided it was time to move on.

(2021 - 2023)

(2023 - today)