About Me

This gitbook is a collection of notes I have gathered in my 10+ years in information technology.

I started my information technology career as a printer technician and I absolutely hated it!! I had people constantly yelling in my ear about why the printer doesn't simply print and of course no one wants to hear the technical details, they just simply want it to be fixed. I got tired of hearing FIX IT and decided to move into help desk.

I moved into help desk and things were a little better. This time it was people yelling at me on why their computer wouldn't start or why outlook is not sending/receiving emails, etc. Of course, I also received calls about printers not working and went right back into being a help desk/printer field tech. I was at the point of giving up IT altogether until one employer saw the light and gave me an opportunity to be a junior sysadmin consultant.

Being a sysadmin consultant was LOADS better than dealing with customers yelling at you over nonsense. However, even as a sysadmin especially around the Server 2003 to Server 2008/R2 migration periods it was challenging. The most difficult was explaining to clients why migrating from Server 2003 to 2008 was such as a headache and it simply wasn't a click, click, next procedure. Instead, it was incredibly vague Microsoft errors that pointed to what felt like thousands of different potential issues. There was a lot of plug and pray followed by sleepless nights on support calls with HP, Dell, Microsoft, and various other vendors. Even with the constant head banging of dealing with critical systems failing, I was still happier dealing with angry CTOs than the general public calling me about nonsense. During this period I learned a lot about organization architecture designs and the politics that go into.

I eventually felt like I reached a ceiling as a sysadmin consultant and decided to move into network engineering. Being a network engineer was a ton of fun primarily because nothing has changed since the mid-late 80's so learning the material was incredibly easy. Furthermore, my skill set as a sysadmin was heavily utilized because networking and systems simply blend well together. At the same time, I started to acquire various certifications in the networking and systems space.

I was learning at such a fast-pace I accelerated my career into architecture design and quickly left behind my day to day role of break-fix scenarios. I primarily was speaking to CTO's and CFO's about architecture designs pros/cons and costs. It felt amazing moving away from having yelling matches with end users to having sophisticated conversations on IT business goals.

One of the biggest problems with working for a consulting firm is if a client is willing to pay for it, someone will figure out a solution and do whatever it takes to extract as much money out them as possible. My networking engineer career ended when a client abused my skill set to redesign and deploy a brand new environment to meet PCI compliance. The worse part is I could not receive any assistance from the onsite employees because the CTO and managers had zero confidence in their staff. I'm not a complete asshole so I waited for the project to be over and handed in my two-week notice before the project end date.

The following day I started working as a junior penetration tester and now things were very exciting because I was able to put all my skills to use and the conversations this time were very different. I spent a lot of time after performing the initial penetration test explaining to CEO's and other C-Suite execs the importance of cyber security and what could happen vs, in theory, this could happen.

Fast forward several years later and I'm still a penetration tester and I honestly don't see myself leaving this space. I finally found a career that I can use my entire skill set on a daily basis and I'm constantly learning new skills/techniques. I primarily moved around a lot because I felt pigeonholed and I don't like the idea of being limited. Also, I'm the type of person if I'm not learning I feel obsolete and everything goes downhill from there lol.