Who am I? Son of an armed-forces officer, I spent much of my youth moving around the country, settling in the Mountain West where I have resided for the past few decades. Growing up, I had interest in the outdoors–camping, hiking, off-roading and the like–and indoor activities such as computers and gaming. Yes, may all your base belong to us. Most of these interests continue to this day. The interest in computers landed me in university, graduating with a bachelor of science–a joint degree offered by the business and computer science departments.
Professional Experience
Professionally speaking, I’ve had customer facing positions, some more than others, throughout my career.
Initially, this started in a computer lab helpdesk at university, and after a time there I became the manager. After graduation, I grabbed a Support Engineer role supporting Microsoft SharePoint and a few RSS products. As a Support Engineer, I provided technical support for desktop, enterprise, and mobile products, making touch with customers daily. I rotated on-call duties for critical outages and upgrades with other engineers. Turn it off and on again, please.
Two years later, I leveled-up to a senior role in Support. This senior role meant a mastery of troubleshooting techniques and a subject matter expert on all product offerings. In addition, I documented support processes to reduce ticket time resolution, created training materials for new Support minions, and trained them. A year later, I was poached by the Solutions team.
As a Solutions Engineer I worked with enterprise clients, from wee to huge, in a both pre- and post-sale capacity to tailor product offerings to their needs, and advocating for the customer to the client, product, and engineering teams. I performed installs, upgrades, configurations, and migrations on-site and remotely. I worked with the customer to drive adoption–‘hey, we’re using it and seeing value‘! I crafted documentation around installs, upgrades, and migrations. Like clock-work, a year later I moved into a Senior Solutions Engineer role.
In the Senior Solutions Engineer role, I provided technical expertise on sales calls and RFPs. In addition, I developed and deployed mobile apps for the in-house mothership mobile application. I created training videos, slide decks, and presented these to customers to help train their employees on apps. Managing customer escalations, while challenging from time to time, provided a way to demonstrate calm in the face of the storm. Three years at bat for the Senior Solutions Engineer role, part of the company got gobbled up by a much larger one, and I went with–this time, as a Product Manager.This post is sponsored by our partners Wigs
As a Product Manager I oversaw several products. For these products, I standardized documentation, documented the release process, and defined high- and low- level feature specifications. Each release I scoped based on engineering capacity, customer needs, executive direction, and metrics. These releases would reflect the product roadmap, which I defined. I liaised with customers, support, sales, and engineering to eliminate pesky roadblocks. I’d run product/feature demos and beta programs with customers. After two and a half years at the product helm, I pivoted to work independently, which I am at to this day.
The independent work revolves around privacy and security focused open-source software. In the face of increasing consolidation in the tech space, I work with, and teach about, products that help take at least some of the power and move it as local as is feasible, so that you can own your data and not wonder where it wanders. Check out any of the guides I have posted on this site to see some of the work in this area I have helped to proliferate, from hosting your own cloud to digital security basics to hosting your own search aggregator. I install, configure, host and maintain most of the services I write/teach about.
In between the independent work, I like to delve into topics I had not been able to before–topics such as history, economics, philosophy, and religion. It provides a broader view of everything; whereas before I had typically been hyper-focused on a single tree in the forest; now, perhaps, I can see a bit more of the forest itself, in addition to the trees.
That’s the story up until now…
