Welcome to Techtone

This blog is a place where I write about what I do in tech and what I tinker with in my lab. I’ll be sharing projects I work on for personal learning, along with technologies, ideas, and experiments I find interesting. My hope is that some of you will find them useful or at least interesting too. But first, a little about me.

I started my career in 2005 doing helpdesk work for a telecom company in the Midwest. I learned a lot about troubleshooting dialup and DSL internet, and webhosting. 

In 2007, moved to a call center company I had previously worked for, this time joining the IT department as the lead network services technician. I was responsible for all of the workstations, servers, networking gear, and telecom equipment in the building. This was also an extremely valuable time in my career where I learned so much about networking, software, mass PC imaging, IP telephony and many other projects. I spent about seven years in that role working through a wide range of deployments, along with many late nights on call. Maintenance windows were often the only opportunity to make changes due to the long operating hours of the call center. During that time, a friend introduced me to VMware, and I was immediately fascinated by the ability to move a running OS between physical hosts with no downtime.

That curiosity pushed me to pursue certification, and I earned my first VCP in 2014. I used what I learned from the Install, Configure, Manage course to land my next role at a manufacturing company with several plants across the Midwest. There, I spent years learning, fixing architectural mistakes in their VMware environment, and steadily improving the infrastructure.

Eventually, I set a personal goal to work at VMware, a goal I achieved through networking and brand building within the VMUG community. Along the way, I made many friends and started my career at VMware in 2019 as a vSAN Specialist SE. I spent the next six years doing some really cool things and learning from a lot of incredibly smart people.

Most recently, I joined Pure Storage as a Field Solutions Architect. I’m only a few weeks in, but it’s been exciting ramping up and working through the required certifications and training material. I’m genuinely impressed by the technology, and the people and culture have been a great fit. This isn’t a paid commercial, I’m simply happy to have landed at a company where the tech and the team align so well.

I’m currently in the process of migrating my home lab to new hardware and evaluating alternative hypervisor options, since I no longer have access to the VMware licensing I used previously. I plan to document this journey and build a series of posts around what I learn along the way.

So come along with me as I explore new platforms, learn new things, and keep tinkering in the lab. Thanks for reading.