I've been working in IT since I was in middle school. I spent a lot of time upgrading modems and eventually converting them to DSL networks from the repair shop out of my parents dining room up until the point I moved off to college in Atlanta, GA. I came across a handful of opportunities after I was hired by the Division of Information Technology at Southern Polytechnic State University in late 2002. I eventually ran into a 6-month project through my side business converting an tunneled T1 MAN to an MPLS network. Afterwards I decided to make the jump into full time consulting. I consulted around Atlanta for 2 years before picking up a full-time position as a .net developer. Since then, I've learned a lot about the best way to code for both the business, the developers, the network, and most importantly the software's end users.
After reading the Phoenix Project and attending Velocity San Francisco in 2013, I focused my career aspirations on devOps and became more active in the Atlanta tech community.
By 2016 I had organized my 1st devopsdays Atlanta conference and devOpsATL meetup. Thanks to connections I had made presenting at events across the US, I was eventually introduced to Wardley mapping and the cynefin framework. My work and research into complexity science led me to a deeper understanding of devOps, and how lean manufacturing, human factors, and chaos engineering fit into our broader sociotechnical ecosystem.
Since 2017 I have been working as a consultant serving in both leadership and architecture roles as a change agent fostering digital transformations in large, traditional enterprises. This experience provided an opportunity to expand my systems mindset to org design, along with strategy development and execution.