My first experience with a computer was at the age of 8. Dad taught me DOS on a PC Jr. and gave me the manual + a BASIC programming manual. Computers were just for games and making homework easier until my first introduction to Linux. It was during a computer networking class Jan 1999 and I'll never forget. Everything suddenly just clicked. The open source ideology sucked me in and it has been my passion ever since.

In 2001, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of joining the military and was privileged enough to serve a 1 year tour in Iraq from 2003-2004. My job involved flying UAVs (remote controlled spy planes) and writing tweaks (shell scripts) for the control station running SunOS 5.7 along with the Remote Video Terminal running a customized Redhat Linux 9. The results from some of my tweaks are summarized in a technical paper written with the help of my friend and mentor, Jonathan Morgan.

My active duty military obligation ended in 2005 and a small airline quickly snatched me up to work as a Systems Administrator. There, I worked on things like HP-UX Unix, Bea Weblogic Clusters, and SLES Linux servers. Life was bliss. An editor from Newsforge, a news website I frequent, interviewed me and syndicated it on linux.com.

Finally, a recruiter from California called and spoke with me about working for a large Fortune 500 company as a Linux Systems Administrator. Not only would it be a huge career jump, but working in West Hollywood would be exciting. After much thought, I took the plunge and moved to California. Since 2008, I've worked at Virtu Financial, an electronic market making firm. What can I say, life is good.