Hi, glad you came to visit! I’m Sam, and I’ve been working in IT as a System Administrator since 2000. My journey to IT was a little indirect. I was in grad school at Columbia University, working on a Master’s degree in Archaeology. Through a friend, I was introduced to IRC, and spent a lot of my free time chatting with folks there. Many of the people I met there were quite technical, and chats often veered into who was upgrading what, or building what website. My own computer died, and I decided this was a good time to learn how to build my own. I threw myself into it, and was seriously hooked by what I learned. While I finished my degree, I decided rather than continuing immediately to a PhD program, I’d take a break and see where this tech thing led me….and I’ve never looked back. Over twenty years later, and I still haven’t decided my “break” is over. Working in computing has been interesting and challenging, and I love that I’m constantly learning new things.
About The Blog
I’ve been thinking about having a website again for quite a while. I’d like to document some of the tricks I’ve learned over the years, and make them available to anyone who might find them useful. Initially, though, I’m using this blog to document my work on the Cloud Resume Challenge. I’m eager to shift my career towards cloud technologies, and while certifications are a great way to get started, I’ve found I need to get my hands on tech to really understand it. The Challenge covers a good range of services I want to understand better, and seems like a good framework to build on.
My Skills and Experiences
Most of my career has been working in a two-person shop managing the full infrastructure for a computer science department. That means I’ve had the opportunity to work with a very wide range of technologies at various times.
I started out designing and building a Windows instructional lab, and followed that by doing the same with MacOS – and in both cases, integrating them into our primarily Unix-like environment. Over the years, our back end has consisted of Solaris, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and Windows servers, with services including everything from authentication (NIS, LDAP, AD), file storage (via NFS and SMB) and web services (Apache and Nginx) to administrative tools like pxe, jumpstart, Ghost, JAMF and license servers to a rapidly expanding VMWare cluster to supporting all sorts of tools used for computer science instruction and research. I think I’ve lost count of the number of languages I’ve learned a smattering of, and IDEs I’ve learned to use.
Supporting researchers has always been the most interesting and challenging part of my job. Areas have included computer vision, robotics, network spanning, AI training, big data, machine learning, and operating system design. Each area has its own tools I’ve needed to learn and support, and often they aren’t mature, well supported tools either. More than once I’ve had to dig into research papers to understand why some library isn’t working as it should be, or to help a researcher build out hardware to support the newest tools. It definitely keeps me on my toes!
Now, I’m working for a technical agency as a Senior Cloud Engineer – which means the original point of creating this blog worked! My day-to-day work is pretty varied – writing Infrastructure as Code, building or modifying CI/CD pipelines, helping developers with migrations, troubleshooting systems, and consulting on cloud design. I’m very much enjoying the career shift, and I’m excited to see where this path takes me.
Beyond Tech
Outside of my working life, much of my free time is devoted to social justice related work. I’m a co-founder of our local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, which seeks to educate and involve other white people in the push for racial equity. Much of our local chapter’s work involves designing and running workshops around racial issues, such as how to respond when one hears a racist remark. I also have taught at the University level, both computing and sociology, and that’s been such a privilege. I’m moderately involved with local city and county politics as well. I’m a member of the Democratic committee for my legislative district, and have worked on a couple campaigns for local offices, like city council, county legislator, and city court judge. I also enjoy hiking and photography, and I’m hoping to take my first overnight backpacking trip later this year!