A Concise Autobiography

Career Snippet

The months of Q3‘24 have offered an appropriate time for a mini-sabbatical, during which time I’ve been focused on a recent relocation to Vancouver, Washington in the lovely Pacific Northwest. My most recent position of interest has been seven years of engagement at Fastly Inc as the sole “Principal Systems Architect”, where I managed and scaled pre-production lab environments for the Hardware & Performance Engineering teams. Aside from Fastly, I’ve had two+ decades of experience in various roles leading up to Principal seniority, most commonly as a contract/consultant working on a wide array of critical services and architectures, from municipal compute infrastructure to post-dot-com startups, internet backbone networks, and just about everything in-between.

Systems and Hardware Preferences

Core Systems Preferences

GNU Systems Preferences

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.

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 love and caring and kindness are foundational virtues upon which succeess is often moored - in an existence of ever-present storms.