ABOUT ME
I joined the US Navy 3 days after I turned 17, and became
a part of the early onslaught of the computer revolution.
We worked on antiquated equipment that ranged from
1MB platter hard drives the size of a bus, to early
encrypted communication systems used by the 7th fleet
Admiral for secure communication. It was some of the
earliest digital processing, and allowed me the unique
position of having the experience to follow electrons
down to the transistor and toroidal memory core level.
It was amazing, but the Navy was not the life for me,
and after 7 years of Service and 3 years of living in Japan,
my wife, my daughter, and I returned to Houston to
reconnect to our surrogate home town.
I joined the corporate world at Shell Oil to work with early Sun Computer systems and the Communication systems required for them to "Network". This was the beginning of of my Routing experience and included everything from Source Route Bridging (SRB) to DECNet and LAT, IPX, DLSW, IPeX, and of course IP, all of which ran over Pre-10base-T, TokenRing, FDDI, and any sort of Wide Area transport. 6 years of knuckles skinned on AGS+ routers and beta testing Synoptics hubs and MAUs, opened the door for additional opportunities in the fast paced, highly competitive, and customer facing world of a Systems Engineer at Cabletron Systems, which was my entry into Systems Engineering, and the world of pre-IPO high tech companies. I have worked with clients to build world class networks (switching and routing), scaled and redundant networked applications (application delivery), and network and cloud security. I have also worked with corporate partners developing and documenting integrations to help customers create a homogeneous secure infrastructure.
Finally, I created www.testtheproxy.com while trying to demonstrate a Zscaler feature and found I was using the competitors website to demonstrate the capabilities. I then added features I needed to demonstrate product capabilities live and tell the technical story I was trying to show my customers. The site greatly increased my success as a technical representative and customer advocate. Making this capability available to my fellow engineers and customers I hope will become a legacy of some sort.
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I am a lucky man having complete support of my family for any career changes I have made, and attribute that and hard work to the success I have had. Although, my true success is being a part of a team that has raised two wonderful kids and now their children. :-)
