About Me
I'm a software engineer living in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. I moved here in 2015 when I was hired by IBM out of college. I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I consider myself a technology enthusiast, and I have been interested in coding from a very young age, around 6 or 7 years old. I find that it's always exciting to work on new projects, and I am passionate about the work that I do. I love to experiment and I'm not afraid to try new things even if that means that I will fail.
My current focus is on Linux and open source technology. I'd like to give credit to the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser for introducing me to the concept of free and open source software. It is possible that because of my interest in the way that Firefox was developed with help from the community that I even discovered Linux in the first place.
My first experience with Linux was with a distribution called Slackware 10.2. While at the time I found it hard to use compared to Windows XP, I eventually gave Linux another shot with Fedora Core 5. Fedora really showed me that Linux can be very user-friendly, and I fell in love with the large repository of software included, especially compared to Windows. While I eventually ended up switching to Ubuntu mainly because of the community that grew around it, I have been "distro-hopping" and trying out new technology ever since. I've been using Linux almost exclusively since around 2008.
From 2011 to 2015, I attended Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. During this time, I studied software engineering, earning my bachelor's degree with minors in Management Information Systems and Computer Science. I also earned an ISACA certification called "Cybersecurity Fundamentals" during my time studying in college. Penn State gave me the opportunity to work on numerous projects, learn about software design patterns, and some discrete mathematics relevant to computer science. I've made some connections there that I hope to be lifelong friends with.
Over the years, I've worked with a wide variety of languages (programming and markup), although I've found that I mostly do my work in Python, Java, and shell script. I do a large portion of my hobbyist development "in the open", publishing source code that I work on. If you're interested in some of the stuff I do, I suggest you take a look at my GitHub page. I've also contributed to several FOSS projects in my spare time, including writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various open source projects.
After graduating, I started my career at IBM as a software engineer, where I developed a RESTful Python-based cloud discovery microservice for the IBM UrbanCode Deploy blueprint design server and contributed Java code to its blueprint designer, including OpenStack heat plugins. I also served as a Site Reliability Engineer for the IBM Bluemix code delivery pipeline service.
In 2018, I moved to Truist as a platform engineer in the financial services industry. There, I contributed to the development of an internal OpenStack cloud environment using VMware Integrated OpenStack and designed GitLab CI/CD pipelines for building and deploying corporate software using Terraform.
Most recently, I spent four years as a senior cloud engineer at Curi, a medical malpractice insurance company. This role gave me the opportunity to lead significant cloud infrastructure efforts, including migrating legacy servers from on-premises and VMware Cloud to Amazon EC2, building out multiple AWS accounts with standardized networking and permissions using OpenTofu modules, and deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters for production services. I also developed automation using Selenium to configure and validate commercial off-the-shelf software and built CI/CD pipelines for container images. On the security side, I worked closely with the cybersecurity team to implement monitoring and auditing solutions using Security Lake and the Rapid7 Insight Platform.
Professionally, I've had a strong focus on cloud technology, infrastructure-as-code, containers, networking, and DevOps.
Outside of work, I enjoy applying the same technologies to personal projects. I've self-hosted my own infrastructure for years, provisioning servers with Ansible and managing DNS with Terraform. I run a homelab in a closet of my house, with some Dell rackmount servers, Ubiquiti networking equipment, and a NetApp disk shelf. I've experimented with everything from spinning up cloud servers on various providers to running Kubernetes clusters on Oracle Cloud's always free tier. I write about many of these projects on my blog, as it's a good way to document what I've learned and share it with others.
Over the years, I've picked up a few certifications along the way. While working at Truist, I earned MuleSoft's Certified Developer credential, as the role required proficiency in API development on their platform. When a later employer required me to get AWS certified, I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam without any studying. More recently, I took the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified Architect Associate exam for fun during Oracle's Race to Certification 2025 event, having become familiar with OCI through hosting personal projects on their generous always free tier.
I'm constantly learning new things, and look forward to the new opportunities that the future will bring.