About Me

I am an average American that grew up with our modern computerized world. I am almost as old as UNIX: my family had the first home video game console, Pong when it was new. Later, I played arcade-quality games at home on the Atari 800. I connected to bulletin boards with a Commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem over a decade before I heard of the internet.

I joined the Navy when I was 16, worked on some of the oldest digital computers from the 60s to mainframes to futuristic systems.
I was a big fan of the Playstation. I was fascinated with the submarine I was on, but a change of scenery was nice and Tomb Raider was ahead of it’s time.

I played the grandfather of Fortnite (Unreal Tournament) with my brother over 56k land line. It worked well if nobody joined from a T1 line.

In 1999, I heard about the Playstation2; It was going to able to run Linux and was as powerful as a UNIX workstation 5 or 6 times the cost. It became my goal to learn Linux before the PS2 became available on the US market.
By the time I got my PS2, I already built a Linux PC more powerful than the PS2, but my love for Linux was established.
I had been laid off from aerospace and defence jobs enough to loose my enthusiasm for electronics. I fell back on the only other thing I was passionate about: UNIX.

I worked at Cingular before it went back to AT&T, I worked at Napster as it went international. I built high-performance big data clusters, built the infrastructure for a major electronics retailer, led migrations from data center to data center, physical to virtual, one hypervisor to another, virtual to
container and data center to cloud. I designed and deployed backup solutions, marketing platforms, worked on intelligent video streaming applications, and secured networks from foreign attacks. I worked at AWS on a multi-account, secure, industry compliant Landing Zone Accelerator service.

Designing for Security is fun. You start with your defaults, then think of every attack vector and have a plan for it. It’s like a big tower defense game.
I’ve patched production systems against zero-day vulnerabilities and stopped an intrusion as it was happening. It was exciting to track the movement of the attack from system to system and isolate it before it did any real damage.

Designing for reliability is fun like a strategy game. You build things with enough capacity and redundancy while keeping costs down. Overkill is expensive, and cheap is fragile. The balance is the challenge. H/A pairs are good, but clusters are even better. Backups are necessary, but you can adjust retention time to keep costs down.
I’ve eliminated single-point failures everywhere and then recognized myself as one. At several companies I was on call almost all of the time and things got escalated to me when I wasn’t. I made sure I had 2 laptops, and documented as much as I could so that someone else could fill in for me if I was unavailable.

Designing for performance is exciting like a racing sim. You add caching, distribution and parallel operations while keeping on budget.
At one company, I found and proved some high-performance storage that boosted the speed of common servers above the exotic architecture they were hosting their databases on. I led the migration and was able to sell the old servers for six figures while cutting database licensing costs in half.
At another company, I tuned PostgreSQL to out-perform Oracle. After that migration, we cut that license cost entirely.

Designing for compliance is just like competing in a game with complicated rules. The player who understands the rules the best has an advantage. I’ve designed for PCI environments multiple times, participated in audits and configured policies. Designing SMS marketing platforms within the wireless carriers rules is just as tricky as designing email marketing platforms within the ISPs rules. I’ve done both.

I learned a lot about resiliency and redundancy when I got the Submarine Warfare Qualification. With something as important as that, there was a backup to a backup to everything. Everything could take damage and still work with degraded performance. Security, stealth, performance, availability, resilience, privacy, disaster recovery, damage control, and mission were all top priorities. When everything is life or death, the mission is more important than that, and rival forces want you to fail, you need to have a plan for everything; have options for success in spite of the inevitable failure.

I applied the lessons I learned about resiliency and redundancy to my work in hardware engineering for aerospace and defence. The principles apply to all engineering; to all systems, even biological ones. We have redundant hands, legs, eyes, lungs, and the single-point failures are very resilient. The brain and spinal nerves are armored in extra bone. The heart has a cage around it.

Business is just as urgent. You can’t afford the loss of customer confidence if you have a security breach. You can’t afford the loss of revenue if you have a long outage. Your competition is racing to take your market share. Revenue suffers if performance is low. Computer systems are the heart of a business. They need to be performant, resilient, redundant, backed-up, documented, maintained, guarded from attack, all while costing as little as possible. Disaster recovery sites support continuity of business and uptime. Documentation makes it maintainable, while Infrastructure as Code makes it repeatable.

All of this was a lot of words to say that I love architecting, building, and solving. I will post my opinions, stories, guides for cool things I do in my spare time, and whatever else may be useful or interesting.

As 🫵 YOU are my favorite reader, I’d like to read any of your comments, questions or suggestions. Send them to me at info@ath-x.net. Let me know if you need some consulting work.