About Me

I've been into computers since I was a kid creating simple interactive games and learning about how computers and software work and come together has been my passion ever since.

In high school, I made a "Breakout" knock off which, much to my chagrin, I could never figure out why the ball would sometimes slip through the corner of my bricks. But debugging it was hopeless as I had yet to discover "comments", ha ha!

Unroots Online game stats page

From there, I would go on to work with friends from high school and subsequently get help from classmates at BCIT as well to make an online game called "Unroots Online", a.k.a. URO. It was a war / strategy game with a small but dedicated group of players; we reached about 300 active players. URO ran on a classic LAMP stack and was about 70K SLOC. This game was run on an old PC running RedHat Linux in my parents' basement and it went through a couple dozen interactions over a few years.


The hands-on experience keeping a LAMP stack running along with email, DNS and other network functions got me interested in the system administration area of the computer world. Upon finishing the CST diploma program at BCIT in 2002, I started working in IT.

Out of school initially, I worked at a North America-spanning Internet Service Provider. We supported over 100 sites across Canada and the US by the time I left the organization.  If you've never worked in Internet support, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie do it the best:

... And if you think they're kidding, in my experience, we fielded calls from people in a power outage working on a laptop by candle light asking why the internet was out, a crocodile ate the network uplink at one site, and I've taken a call in the middle of the night after a site went down when a pickup truck missed a fork in the road and barreled into our cable plant. Or my favourite call; helping a customer whom I couldn't understand a single word yet still managed to get back Online.

While working "Internet Help Desk", I went back to school part time to upgrade my diploma to a Bachelor of Technology (BoT). To complete the BoT, I went to the IRMACS Centre at Simon Fraser University where I worked with CANARIE and CA*NET on a project with User Controlled Light Paths. UCLP Integration Project

For more of my professional history, connect with me on LinkedIn.

You can also see what my home network looks like.

Ciao!