Non-traditional path. Unusual toolkit.

My earliest real leadership came young. By my late teens I was responsible for a team of people and a fleet of equipment they depended on — the kind of operational ownership most of my peers wouldn’t see for another decade. That instinct — taking outcomes personally, building systems other people can rely on — predates everything else on my resume. The rest has been applying it to different kinds of systems.

The path into IT wasn’t linear. I was a carpenter first — physical work, measuring twice, fixing what breaks. Then ten years at Bosch selling industrial tooling to manufacturers and service shops across the northeast. I spent most of that decade walking plant floors, talking to maintenance supervisors and plant managers, and learning how factories actually run.

Somewhere along the way I figured out I liked the servers more than the sales quota. I took a one-person “IT specialist” seat at a specialty chemicals manufacturer and proceeded to do the job of a Director of Technology — because that’s what the business needed and no one told me not to.

In my first year I delivered 27 initiatives totaling about $257K in annual impact and a projected $988K over three years: ISP and phone renegotiations, a multi-node Proxmox cluster, a full network rebuild with OT/IT segmentation, a security stack, badge migration, AD consolidation, an ERP upgrade program, custom applications (MOC, QC, asset tracking, muster), document-automation pipelines, and the start of enterprise AI deployment grounded in our own data.

The common thread: I like building systems that other people depend on. Servers, databases, deployment pipelines, and the automation that lets a three-person ops team move like a twenty-person one. I also enjoy the adjacent disciplines — physical security (cameras, access, building automation) and offensive security (CTFs, DEFCON, hardware hacking). If a system has a keyboard or a door lock attached, I’m probably interested.

What I don’t do: deep OT control-system work. I’m happy to own the network the SCADA sits on, build the MCP server that reads its historian, and harden the infrastructure around it — but I leave the Rockwell ladder logic and AVEVA screens to the control-systems engineers. My value is IT, security, and platform.

The homelab is where I get the breadth I can’t get from a single employer. A Proxmox cluster running real enterprise patterns end-to-end — AI model and RAG deployments, DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, observability, identity and access, security systems — under the same change-control, backup verification, and hardening discipline I’d apply in production. It’s also where I test physical and digital penetration tooling against my own infrastructure before it ever touches a client environment, run CTFs, and generally keep the craft sharp. The fun and the skill-building aren’t separate — the only way the lab gets better is if I do.

Also: DEFCON, custom split keyboards built from scratch, SDR experiments, and a radio-monitor that pings me when my name comes over the plant UHF.