CALIFORNIA.SYSTEMS

  California, IT, Vintage Computing, Earthquakes

This is a personal website unaffiliated with any office, agency, or service of the State of California.

Semi-Professional Biography

I'm a systems engineer from the Los Angeles area. If you don't need my personal background, you can skip right to my career (under "Professional").

Personal

My dad is a software developer, so I grew up surrounded by discarded computers and disparate technical publications. My first clue that I liked computers came when I pined for the Windows 9x-style UI: my elementary school decommissioned its 90s computer lab equipment but redistributed some to the classrooms. I then took every opportunity to use the oldest computer in my classroom, and later emphatically requested that my dad find a way to get me Windows 95. To this end he introduced me to virtual machines, and I slowly started exploring the variety of available operating systems, applications, and the minutiae of computer specifications.

Then at a point in middle school, I found an old C++ book casually tucked away. I decided in that moment - arbitrarily - that I was a computer expert, and that I would be a master programmer, hacker, or sysadmin, depending on my mood that day. In a year of feverish obsession I bummed dead computers off people, tore them apart, put them back together, made Frankenstein machines from gutted parts, and convinced myself that my text-based adventure game - which got rewritten in whatever language I was "mastering" that month - reflected my arcane power. Somewhere in all this I got the Linux bug, and maybe a year or two later I started to actually understand some things. This arc perfectly illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect.

As a bizarre side note: through all this I remained committed to utilizing vintage equipment. I distinctly remember sitting in my kitchen with a Compaq Deskpro 2000. It had an internal modem. I used it to dial-up BBS systems on the PSTN. At the time it wasn't novel: 90s computers were junk which people threw out. No one understood why I was so keen to phone up a BBS.

Professional

My real career started with my first MSP job, which I got at 16. My dad's employer, a hybrid SharePoint development and help desk MSP, was looking to extend an opportunity to a young intern. I applied, and my passion and scattered knowledge were enough to get me in. I don't suppose I mind saying at this point that computers are my strength - I was lucky enough to dumbly stumble on what I do well so early in my life. I worked about five years at my first employer. Within six months I was solving problems which the adult team members couldn't solve, and probably within two to three years I was doing rudimentary systems and network administration for our largest customers. My first employer did mainly help desk for a handful of small businesses in the Los Angeles area and systems and network engineering weren't necessarily the standard offering, but the customers naturally leaned on us for those services anyway. It was an opportunity for me to spread my wings and acquire those skills.

With my systems and network experience I landed a systems administrator job at a much larger MSP, which provided operational and project support to major shipping, K12, healthcare, government, and manufacturing customers in Southern California and nationwide. My primary responsibility was implementing and developing custom monitoring solutions using Nagios XI and Nagios Core, including writing custom check modules in Perl, PowerShell, and Bash. I also carried out site discoveries during onboarding with the sort of rigorous attention to detail needed to write an effective monitor: I knew how to find weakpoints in an environment and could always figure out how to detect a specific failure condition. With so much institutional knowledge it followed that I spearheaded many ransomware recovery efforts, since knowing an environment is the cornerstone of a truly effective response. Finally, as one of the few resources with Linux knowledge, I became the de facto Linux administrator for a pension plan customer when they terminated their internal resource.

My second employer fired most of its mid-level management during the pandemic. Burnout, chaos, and insane hours quickly ensued, so I struck out on my own. While I intended to take a break and focus on a specific career change, I found what I really needed was to go through some personal growth and adopt major value changes. I intended three months; I returned to work a little more than a year later.

Currently I'm a systems engineer with a growing MSP. I mainly keep lights running for their growing customer base while guiding process improvement and onboarding. I also provide mentorship to the service desk and its growing team of aspiring sysadmins. My condescension to "teach" is quickly punished, however: my minutest mistake is pointed out and mercilessly corrected, usually by the juniors, reminding me that no one is truly a master of this field.

Why california.systems?

Try shopping for a domain. I'm sure you'll find it hard to be original in a market whose success is predicated on artificial scarcity. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find I could buy a domain bearing the full name of the land I love, and better yet, under a TLD representing what I do. I'm happy with this result.

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