I'm an experienced IT leader and innovator in Chicago.

About

I've been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember.

Growing up, I loved to take things apart and put them back together. Tinkering with radios, cassette players, other various gadgets, toys, and of course Legos was part of my everyday fun. Soon PCs gained my interest, and while I may not have known it at the time, it was the start of an enduring desire to figure out how things work -- and find ways to make them work better.

I began my career relatively early, starting my first job at a local ISP when I was 16. Since then I've worked in a number of environments, ranging from small-town startups to global enterprises. I take great pride and pleasure in building creative, innovative solutions to the real-world problems I come across, and never turn down the chance to help make businesses more effective and efficient at what they do, no matter how daunting the challenge.

Over the course of my career, I've cultivated a diverse work background that spans engineering, architecture, and technical leadership. I've developed highly-available, highly-parallel, service-oriented applications supporting functions such as infrastructure and business process monitoring, trading operations, and centralized systems management. I also led the delivery of a private cloud platform and am currently the principal architect on an enterprise-wide observability program.

I pride myself on being as full-stack an engineer as I can, from the user experience all the way down "to the metal."

To me, technology is more than a career; it's something I love and a life-long passion that I'm lucky enough to pursue every day. Despite the fact that I've been in this field for over two decades, according to that old adage, I've never really worked a day in my life.