About Me

My Story

I'm not really one to write about myself, so I'll keep this short and let the resume do the heavy lifting.

I came into networking through an unusual side door — a B.A. in Music Theory and Saxophone, then an A.S. in Computer Science a couple of years later.

I started at the helpdesk in 2014 and have spent the last decade at Cyber Advisors moving up from service desk to Senior Network Project Engineer — roughly 500 projects in, across healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, and retail. The part I'd rather highlight, honestly: ten years in, I still genuinely like the work.

What I'm looking for next is somewhere to put down roots — build an infrastructure practice from the inside, mentor the engineers coming up behind me, and stick around long enough to see the second-order consequences of my own designs.

My Philosophy

A handful of things I've stopped negotiating on:

• There's always an answer; the work is finding it. I don't believe in unsolvable problems — only ones I haven't sat with long enough.
• Right-size the solution. A small antique shop doesn't need a laser security system with a machine gun turret. Aligning the architecture to the actual asset — not to the engineer's enthusiasm for the technology — is half the job.
• Be direct, especially when it's bad news. Clients don't need a polished version of what went wrong; they need to know what happened, what the impact is, and what comes next. Blame-shifting onto vendors or technology helps no one.
• Document like you're handing it off tomorrow. If the next engineer can't pick up the network from the diagram alone, the project isn't finished.
• Mentorship isn't optional. Junior engineers get my time before anything else outside my direct scope. I had mentors who did exactly that for me, and I know what it was worth.

Outside of Work

In February of 2026, my wife and I welcomed our son Michael. He's the most demanding stakeholder I've ever signed on with — no documentation, frequent escalations, scope changes at all hours — and easily the most worth it. The rest of life now happens in the spaces around him, exactly as it should.

When I'm not on a project or on baby duty, you can usually find me:

• Out on a golf course. After a week of staring at firewalls, the prescription tends to be: go touch grass. I take it literally — swing still a work in progress.
• Buried in the home lab. A SuperMicro board with dual Xeons, around 200TB of storage, a couple of GPUs, and Unraid running an embarrassing number of containers. Most of what's in there I built as an excuse to keep learning — AI agents for home automation and security alerting, a fully automated media stack, and traffic monitoring through my (Fortinet, naturally) firewall.
• Tinkering more than is strictly necessary. After running formal security assessments at enterprise clients, my home environment honestly holds up well in comparison. That is either reassuring or concerning, depending on your perspective.

Photos coming to the gallery soon — Michael's schedule wins.