About me

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I like working with computers! I don’t mean just development of new code, or managing the compute resources to deploy code. I mean computers, any which way they come. I think they are a handy tool that I try to learn more about all the time so I can use them better. This started with my family PC, which was a 486 with 4 mb of RAM, 500 mb HDD. What did I want to do with that? Play video games, as many as I could, as cheap as possible, and online whenever I could. Getting PC games to work as best as it could on my limited hardware and on dial-up networks-or sometimes setting up a local area network- was my first education in getting computers to bend to my will.

After five years (the five was because I was just having too much fun!) of Texas A&M University’s curriculum in Political Science, I thrust my young self out into the 2009 job market, which just got hit with what would be called ‘The Great Recession’. With not much luck finding any work in my native USA, I found a ESL teaching grant in Spain. I had the honor of teaching English as a second language in the big flat round spot of plains south of Madrid called La Mancha. My travels were a bit bold compared to my colleagues. I wanted the full foreigner experience while I had the chance. I found that with the right attitude, prep work about the language and history, and a willingness to try anything the locals do will open a lot of doors whenever you’re a stranger in a strange land.

Working in landscaping by day and bartending by night. Any job I thought I might be good at that required a college degree was not impressed with my credentials. Seeking work as a public school teacher entered my sights because of the attainability of the job. To do so required a lot of more ‘schooling’ and money which I did not have. I was feeling a little desperate. Trapt in a life that was fun at the moment, but burdened with a lack of ideas about where I was going to be in five or ten years

Back against the corner of my impending end of youth, I did something drastic and joined the US Navy. It had been a wild hair I’ve always had rooted in from growing up in a family rife with sailors and marines. The surface reason for why I joined was to learn a trade- computers. The subtext was I had a curiosity about what military life was like. They also promised I’d get to see the world!

The Navy had me for six years. The first two were classroom instruction that reminded me of college, but with uniforms and stricter enforcement of rules. I was taught the fundamentals of electronic engineering and the instruments needed to diagnose what is wrong with electronic components, and at the end a focused class on the actual piece of equipment I would be responsible for at sea. The following four years were ‘the fleet’. However, my ship in the fleet was a yet to be built new class of aircraft carrier that was not set to be seaworthy until years after I arrived. The job I had been taught to perform was on hold until my ship was ready to get underway.

For a year or two before the ship finally went to sea I kinda had the ‘grown up’ adult job facilitating the IT and office management needed for my department’s offices in the shipyard. More and more leadership was showing up all the time needing a PC to connect to classified and unclassified networks, and they needed an office to use the PC. My chain of command noticed I was capable of installing a Windows office network and jumping through the administrative hoops to officially order the office equipment requested by departmental leadership.

I did find Unix/Linux knowhow because the CLIs were something I could find that made sense in that frankenstein hodge-podge of archaic computers working together to share radar telemetry with other ships. The fostering of relationships with all the other maintenance techs that are involved with LINK transmission also showed me how to get a cranky employee to help you with your problem. The spottiness of offship email and the frequency of unknown faults also taught me how to write very concise yet info dense emails.

Taking this comfort I had working with less than modern computers that can only be interacted with at the command line found me work as a Systems Administrator for a company holding a longstanding contract to maintain software used by the Department of the Navy. A lot of the apps involved in this contract were ‘legacy’ that required Solaris as the operating system.

I was hired to be the first ‘junior’ admin for the development and test environment. For many years the position was just one admin passing down what they knew from one to the next, with actually only a few in the twenty year lifespan of the development and test environment. This boss was a command line wizard that resolved every trouble ticket with VIM.

Even though he was the best Solaris admin there was in town, he wasn’t untouchable. He got fired and I got shoehorned into his position. I wasn’t pleased with it, but once again I heard the whisper of my dad telling me this would once again, ‘build character’. It was not a total disaster. The release cycle for software coming out of the environment I managed came out on time. The people that had regular needs among the servers I managed found me to be much more agreeable than the Unix wizard before me. So much so that they brought lots of new ideas forward because they were no longer afraid to deal with IT.

Behind the scenes of my day job, I was learning Python as a language for software development. This began back in my time in the Navy when I had a hunch knowing the in’s and out’s of one programming language would be helpful in a career in IT, even though it does not require that kind of knowledge. I found opportunities to use Python for quick problem solving at my job and replaced some of my Bash scripts with Python ones. This foray into Python whetted my appetite for something in development. A place where I could build something from the ground up rather than police the work of others.

My first job after receiving this thorough instruction in Python and predictive models built using data science and machine learning libraries was promised to use both Python and data science. What I did find was old fashioned business intelligence and SQL. There was indeed one working forecasting model (that has not changed much since its creation in the 90s), and I did get to be a part of auditing this model so I did get to say I was doing ‘data science’. The great bulk of my work was automating what was before done manually. For a while I indeed get to use Python to do my work on my laptop. Any solution that needed to scale up and get scheduled needed to be reworked into SQL

After building a lot of data architecture and then orchestrating the pipelines between them using SQL I came to discover just what ‘data engineering’ just might be. Ever since I saw that term I drew to it much more than ‘data science’ or ‘system administrator’. I think I for once can see what ‘value’ I bring to an organization that has a lot of data on their hands but don’t know what to do with it.