I'm originally from a small farmtown in Indiana named Winamac. I lived there off and on for my formative years, and still have family there. When I was 10 my mom, brother and I moved to Dallas, Texas and lived there through high school. After graduating I moved back to Indiana for a couple of years, then moved back to Dallas and eventually enlisted in the Navy, primarily for college funds. I went through boot camp in Illinois, "A School" in Tennessee, and after graduation was attached to an F-18 squadron in California. I spent 3 years and a few months there and did 2 "WestPAC" cruises to the Middle East. We got to visit several countries during those cruises including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Dubai.
I finished up my tour with the Navy in March 1997 and moved back to Dallas, where I worked in the civilian aircraft maintenance industry for 3 1/2 years, then managed to get myself into college in 2001. I graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications Technology, i.e. web design, and from there started my journey through the IT world professionally. My first job had me managing and developing several small e-commerce websites, where I gained some valuable experience. After that I did some freelancing for a couple of years, then relocated to California for a change of scenery, where I landed the job I'm currently at with Hurricane Electric.
In my free time I enjoy playing strategy video games, watching movies online, working on these websites and the servers that run them. I've built this site from the ground up - I started a small business in 2022, got myself a cabinet at one of HE's data centers and filled it with servers, routers and switches I procured along the way. I'm still figuring out my business model.
This site was built with Python and Django running the backend. I'm refreshing my web design skills with Bootstrap on the frontend, which is fun to tinker with. It runs on a bare-metal hypervisor on an old server that's running Ubuntu 22.04. I also put together a mail server on the same hypervisor that was challenging to configure. It uses MailCow for the email services. I initially was going to build the mail server with Dovecot and Postfix on the backend and Roundcube on the frontend, and I got that partially working, but ran into so many issues that I started over with MailCow. MailCow is a LOT easier to install and configure, as it's meant to be an out-of-the-box email service software.