A Concise Autobiography¶

Career Snippet¶

Since 2017 I’ve worked at Fastly Inc as the sole “Principal Systems Architect”, presiding as an original / founding member of the Hardware & Performance Engineering teams. Prior positions include a range of critical services and architectures, from small town municipal government compute infrastructure to post-dot-com startups, internet backbone networks, and just about everything in-between.

Systems and Hardware Preferences¶

Favorites - Operating Systems: FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, Solaris, OSX on PPC64/G5, Chimera Linux - Architectures: PowerPC-64, POWER9, ARM64, RISC-V

Not Favorites The tragedy of SystemD implicitly indicates that any linux distro which uses SystemD will be a non-favorite. Regardless, I still have to use RHEL, Debian, Alpine, and Gentoo. (the last two use OpenRC)

Personal Engineering Labs¶

Having built my career and many interests on enterprise systems hardware, it only makes sense that I would have an extensive homelab that spills over into datacenter colocation. Vintage computing is an associated interest which tends to result in hardware acquisition.

Impacts of External Forces¶

Despite all odds, I survived a near-death event and was hooked up to life support machines while in a coma. Medical terminology defines the event as “Flatline ‘Global Cerebral Ischemia’“. I try to live every day with the awareness and appreciation which that experience provides. Since the flatline event didn’t kill me there’s also a more recent intra-cranial “Neuro-Endocrine Paraneoplastic Tumour” attacking my pituitary gland and wrecking havoc on the rest of the endocrine system.

Impacts of Internal Forces¶

Genetically speaking, my double-helix is broadly Northern-European and Scandinavian, with Ashkenazi and Prussian specificities. Significant numbers of my family were adopted children, with our genetic relatives spread across the USA, Germany, and Israel.

Philosophical Position¶

Describing “the how and why of it all” has repeatedly led to the observation that Causal Determinism makes the most sense as a broad explanation to existential posturing. On the dogmatic side of social pattern analysis, I’m a forever-firm believer in “The Paradox of Tolerance”, and was raised with sufficient formative experiences to know that “religion poisons everything”.