I figured I might as well kick this thing off with an intro post. I live in Phoenix, AZ with my wife and two kids. We have a son and daughter that are both in elementary school. We’ve been here for over a decade and although both my wife and I are transplants, we are fully rooted here in the desert. Most of that has to do with our amazing church community. That and it doesn’t snow. We are what you might consider “mildly outdoorsy”. We like exploring the parts of our state that we can drive to. If you could do overlanding via minivan, that would be our jam.

I’m originally from a small mountain town in Colorado. In classic angsty teen fashion I left immediately after high school and spent the next decade or so bouncing around the country pursuing a couple of different degrees and careers. Neither the degrees nor careers worked out for me. IT was actually a bit of a fall back. I had always liked tinkering around with technology but never seriously considered it for work. A good buddy of mine is a sysadmin, I knew he enjoyed his work and made a decent living so I asked him for some advice. He sat down with me and we worked out a path forward so I could try to get a start in the field. I built an ESXi homelab and started diving in.

Through a mutual friend, I was able to land a job in a NOC at a VAR doing server support. We also handled networking and security. I quickly found out that networking was much better and started working towards my CCNA. I ended up falling in love with the technology and began looking for a pure networking role.

My next stop landed me at a Tier I ISP doing break/fix in their national ethernet NOC. I spent four years there honing my craft and working my way up to a senior technician. I picked up my CCNP and was able to jump back to the enterprise side as an operations engineer for a large hospital system.

My team was tasked with implementing, maintaining, and fixing the campus network. I was heavily involved in all things break/fix as well as a ton of project work deploying technologies around the region. It ended up being around 40% break/fix and 60% implementation and project work. The job was really fun and fulfilling, and I had the privilege of working for a great boss on an incredible team.

Early on in my time here, I knew that wireless was my weak spot so I picked up a CWNA book and the rest, as they say, is history. Once I got my first taste of WiFi, I found that I enjoyed it immensely. I put myself in situations to absorb as much as I could from our wireless design team, volunteered for any sort of WiFi trouble tickets, and continued pursuing my CWNP and CCNP-W certifications. I subscribed to about every wireless podcast out there, have attended countless webinars, and watched dozens of videos from past conferences. An opportunity recently opened up on our wireless team and I was selected to fill the position.

I’m very excited to see where my career takes me as a wireless professional. I’ll be using this space to chronical the things I’m learning, labbing, discovering, and building on my path to CWNE. So, that is my life and career in a nutshell. I hope some of you find some value in what’s to come!

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