[See supplemental disclosures here.]

I’m a 25+ year veteran of Silicon Valley/Bay Area system administration. I’ve done networks, storage, IT, operations, caffeine procurement, and just about anything else that plugs in or acts like it. I’ve worked in 149-person and 149,000-person companies.

Today I am between adventures, and having a few adventures along the way.

For the 6 1/2 years leading up to Fall 2020, I did datacenter partner enablement and, before that, big data integration with Cisco Systems in San Jose, California. Ask me three times what this means and I’ll give you three slightly different answers, but it boils down to working with independent software vendors, channel partners, and internal teams at Cisco to put the pieces of big data analytics and Cisco technology together in a way that solves customer problems and builds business for our partners.

Formerly I was in Business Intelligence Systems Architecture for Disney Interactive in Palo Alto, California. Yes, that Disney… it’s a small world, after all. I worked behind the scenes on an ever-growing range of social gaming platforms for the Mouse.

In the past few years I’ve done a fair bit of public speaking based on the technology I work with today and the technology I’ve endured over the past 20 years. Some of you may have seen me at Strata+Hadoop World NYC, Cisco Live, Splunk .conf, and other regional and local events.

However, any thoughts posited or deposited here are mine alone, and do not represent anyone I work for or have worked for. In fact, most of the content here is completely unrelated to my work, and I’ll excessively disclose when that isn’t the case, or even when it just looks like it isn’t.

I am also the proprietor of Andromedary Instinct, a computer, electronics, and curiosity shop near downtown Sunnyvale, California. Store hours by appointment only.

I was a VMware vExpert for 2013-2018, and a charter Cisco Champion / emeritus from 2013-2014, but neither vendor nor respective program prescribes my positions or opinions on this site, and I do not speak for either company or their affiliated companies on this site.