I taught myself HTML and JavaScript in high school when the web was new. I followed up learning Java and PHP and databases with MySQL. This led me towards systems administration because I needed to setup the systems and got heavily into Linux, Apache, and more. I created the first PHP free webhosting company.

Most of my work has involved systems, networking, and security administrator and engineering. I heavily retooled into the Microsoft relatively early in my career. I have been working with Exchange for 20 years, including every version since 5.5. As an Exchange engineer, I picked up PowerShell in 2007.

I worked for some interesting companies doing DevOps things years before that term was coined, writing Java in Visual Source Safe repositories, automatically deploying test labs, and pushing to production. We even were doing configuration as code with our web servers and the DDL for our databases.