Who Am I?

I'm a father of two lovely girls, a husband to a wonderful wife, an IT professional, and a US Army veteran. I enjoy finding new recipes to cook up, riding my bike on trails, listening to music, programming in my free time, playing video games, and staying up to date with current events.   

 

I grew up in Columbia, Missouri, the home of the MU Tigers. Growing up in Columbia, we’d enjoy the scenery of Capen or Rock Bridge State Park. We’d spend hours on Rock Bridges trails or enjoying the views from Capen's bluffs. We’d explore the MU campus and rest at Quads columns. We’d attend football games in the fall and basketball games during March Madness.

 

I attended Hickman Highschool, where I got my first taste of the IT world with networking and programming classes at the career center.  After high school, I took an untraditional path which consisted of college, the Army, and then more college. I was a junior in high school on 9/11, 2001. I was in my first class of the day when we received news of the planes hitting the towers; a lady from the office entered the classroom and handed a piece of paper to my networking teacher.  He read the note and wondered if it was some sort of a joke.  We realized something was horribly wrong when none of the news sites were loading due to the traffic they were receiving. 

 

 In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, I became interested in joining the Army, but my mother insisted I attend college. I put up a fight but eventually gave in. I wanted to get out of my hometown, which meant MU wasn’t an option, but I also wanted to be close to home, which led me to the University of Central Missouri.  At UCM, I met many great people and got a feel for college life. Unfortunately, I never figured out what I wanted to do, which led to taking a break from college halfway through my sophomore year.  After returning home, my interest in joining the Army resurfaced, and I enlisted within a month. Although my time at UCM was short, that college experience would be essential to my decisions later in life.

 

When I enlisted in the Army, I wanted to start basic training as soon as possible, which left me with three job choices, infantry, field artillery, or carpentry. I picked field artillery, which was a great choice, but in hindsight, carpentry, in my opinion, would have been a better choice for my reintegration into the civilian world after my time in the Army. After enlisting, I was sent to basic training for field artillery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Three months later, I was shipped overseas to South Korea for a year, which gave me the unique experience of living in another culture. After my time in Korea, I was stationed at Fort Stewart before being deployed to Iraq as part of the troop surge. The 14 months I spent in Iraq was one of the most challenging periods of my life.  It was filled with highs and lows, but we got through every day knowing that what we were doing was leaving a real impact. I am thankful for my military experience, as it gave me immense value and life lessons I will carry with me forever. 

 

After my unit returned from Iraq, I spent a few months out-processing from the Army, but more importantly, during that time, I was planning for my future after the Army. After completing the final paperwork to separate from the Army, I started the long drive home from Georgia to Missouri. While I attended college before the Army, I was always interested in computers. I knew that I wanted to hit the ground running with school when I returned home, so I enrolled in community college. I picked a community college for two reasons. Before the passage of the Post-9/11 GI bill in 2008, the older GI bill didn’t cover the cost of a 4-year college. Two, there was a chance that I’d get recalled for another deployment while attending school, and if I finished a 2-year degree before I got called back in, I’d have a degree when I finished. After completing my associate of arts degree at community college, I transferred to a 4-year college where I started to dig into computer science.

 

I started my career in information technology (IT) as a junior software developer and am currently a site reliability engineer (SRE). One of the surprising things I learned early in my IT career was how much more I’d learn on the job. The years I spent in school writing code and designing databases were just an introduction. As I enhanced my skills while developing code, I became interested in the strategies used to deploy code my team was releasing. That interest in the methods we used to deploy code helped me transition to the SRE role, where I developed a strong interest in automation.

 

The most important thing that happened while I was at school after the Amry was meeting my wife, Erin. After graduation, I moved to Saint Louis, where she grew up, and we married in 2014. For the next few years, we traveled the world, enjoyed good food, and spent time with friends. Erin and I knew going into marriage that we wanted kids, and after spending our first few years as just us, we decided to grow our family. Pregnancy didn’t come as easy as we first imagined, but after a year of trying, Lillian was born in November of 2017. Eliza followed soon after May 2019. 

 

I’d learned a lot traveling the world with the military and living the college life, but nothing prepared me for raising kids. Raising kids took some getting used to; it took much more responsibility than anything else I'd ever done. With each child came many joys but also lots of challenges that I wasn't expecting or prepared for, from figuring out how to discipline them correctly to teaching them important values. The responsibility of looking after kids has forced me to focus on bettering my life so that I can provide and offer guidance. I love my family and friends and owe everything I have become today to their influence on my life.