01 Roots

I was born in Albany, New York, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a city that taught me to be resourceful, direct, and to fix what's in front of me. Those two places gave me the grit that's followed me into every server room and every deployment since.

02 The Army & two tours in Iraq

I served in the United States Army as a 25B Information Technology Specialist from 2005 to 2013, including two combat tours in Iraq. The military is where I learned that uptime isn't a metric — it's a responsibility. Discipline, attention to detail, and staying calm when everything is on fire are the habits I carried straight into IT and engineering.

03 Family

I've been married twice, and I'm currently married to Jessica McLaughlin. Together we have a combined six children — a full, loud, wonderful house that keeps me grounded and motivated to keep building.

04 The career

For years I've worked across Systems, Networking, and Software Engineering — through enterprise and federal contracting, then years inside MSPs, ultimately landing at Becket & Lee LLP as their Network Engineer, and still contracting with Angelisanti Elite IT Solutions. Alongside that I work as a Freelance Engineer — taking on systems, networking and software work directly for businesses that need a senior pair of hands without a headcount. The pages that follow break down exactly what that work looks like — the infrastructure I run, the networks I wire, and the software I ship.

01 Becket & Lee LLP — Network Engineer · current

I'm the Network Engineer at Becket & Lee LLP, a creditors' rights law firm. Legal work carries obligations most environments don't — client confidentiality, retention requirements, and audit trails — so the network isn't just expected to be fast, it's expected to be defensible. I own the switching and routing, the firewalls and VPNs, and the site-to-site connectivity that keeps the firm's offices and data center facilities talking to each other.

It's the role where the breadth from everything before it finally pays off: when you're the person the network belongs to, there's nobody to escalate to. You design it, you document it, you're the one awake when a circuit drops.

02 The MSP years — PCS · Tech Impact · Angelisanti Elite IT

Most of what I know, I learned inside Managed Service Providers — PCS, Tech Impact, and Angelisanti Elite IT (formerly American MSP), where I still contract today. An MSP is the fastest education in this field available: instead of one environment, you carry dozens, and every one of them was built by somebody else, to a different standard, with different constraints and a different budget.

That means walking into a network you've never seen and being useful inside an hour. Reading somebody else's cabling, somebody else's VLAN scheme, somebody else's firewall rules — and finding the actual fault rather than the one that's easiest to blame. It's also where I learned the part of the job that isn't technical: telling a business owner honestly what something will cost, what it will fix, and what it won't.

The variety is the point. Vendor breadth, the instinct for what tends to break, and the habit of documenting so the next person isn't stuck — all of it came from carrying a lot of different clients at once.

03 Enterprise & federal contracting — General Dynamics · NCI / AdvanceMed · CoventBridge Group

Before the MSP years I worked inside large enterprise and government-contracting organisations — General Dynamics, NCI / AdvanceMed, and CoventBridge Group. These are environments at the opposite end of the scale from a small business: change control instead of improvisation, formal security and compliance posture, and infrastructure supporting programs where downtime and data handling both carry real consequences.

Working at that scale teaches a different discipline than the MSP world does. Nothing is a one-person decision, everything is documented, and access is deliberate. Between the two, I can move comfortably in either direction — the rigour of an enterprise change window, or the speed a twenty-person company actually needs.

04 U.S. Army — 25B Information Technology Specialist · 2005–2013

My career started in uniform. I served as a 25B — Information Technology Specialist from 2005 to 2013, including two tours in Iraq. A 25B installs, operates and maintains the networks, servers and communications gear a unit runs on: laying and terminating cable, standing up and troubleshooting network infrastructure, maintaining the systems on top of it, and keeping all of it working in conditions that are nothing like a climate-controlled server room.

Eight years and two deployments is where the standard got set. In a garrison network an outage is an inconvenience; downrange, communications are how people stay safe. That's where I learned to fix what's in front of me with what I have, to document so the next shift isn't guessing, and to stay level when everything is failing at once — the habits that made the rest of this career possible.

01 Compute platforms — cloud & on-prem

I work across both sides of the line. In the cloud that means AWS and Microsoft Azure — compute, storage, identity, networking and the managed services that replace racks of owned hardware. On premises it means Windows Server and Ubuntu Server estates: Active Directory, DNS and DHCP, file and print, certificate services, patching and hardening on the Windows side; and on the Linux side the web, database, and application servers that quietly carry most of the load.

Underneath the guests sits the hypervisor, and I run both major ones — VMware vSphere / ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. Clustering, high availability, live migration, templates and golden images, snapshot and backup strategy: the layer that decides whether a hardware failure is an outage or a non-event.

02 Enterprise storage & SANs

Virtualization is only as good as the storage under it. I've deployed, migrated and maintained Dell SANs — both the EMC line and Dell Unity arrays — as well as Pure Storage flash arrays. That covers provisioning LUNs, volumes and datastores; zoning and presenting storage over Fibre Channel and iSCSI; and multipathing so a failed path or controller never reaches the application.

Day to day it's capacity and performance planning, tiering, array-level snapshots and replication for recovery points that actually meet the business's RPO, and the controller firmware and expansion work that keeps an array healthy for its whole service life. Storage migrations between arrays are some of the least forgiving work in the job — done properly, nobody notices they happened.

03 Network platforms — switching, routing & firewalls

Working inside MSPs (Managed Service Providers) means you see everything. For routing and switching that's largely Cisco and HP — core and access switches, stacking, VLAN and trunk design, layer-3 routing and the access control that segments a business cleanly. I've also worked across Aruba gear where a client's estate called for it.

At the edge I configure and support SonicWall, Cisco ASA and Fortinet firewalls — policy and NAT, content and application filtering, IPS, and the VPN termination that connects sites and remote workers. For smaller businesses that need enterprise behaviour without enterprise overhead, I lean on Ubiquiti and Cisco Meraki: cloud-managed switching, routing and Wi-Fi that a small office can actually live with, with centralised visibility and no on-site controller to babysit.

That breadth eventually pointed me toward going deep on Cisco, which is where most of my current work lives — VLANs and trunking, spanning tree, layer-3 routing, access control, and the IOS command line that runs it all. When a network needs to be reliable, segmented, and observable, Cisco is the platform I reach for and the one I know best.

04 VPNs, SD-WAN & cross-country connectivity

Networks are only useful when sites can talk to each other. I build the connection technologies that stitch locations together — site-to-site and client VPN tunnels (IPsec) for secure, encrypted links between offices, data centers, and remote workers.

More recently I've been leaning into SD-WAN, which I'm actively using today for cross-country communications and for connectivity into TierPoint data center facilities. SD-WAN lets me treat multiple underlying circuits — broadband, fiber, cellular — as one intelligent fabric: it steers traffic over the healthiest path in real time, fails over instantly when a link degrades, and applies consistent security and policy everywhere. The result is that a branch in one state and a data center on the other side of the country behave like they're on the same LAN, with the resilience a business actually depends on.

05 Need this work done? Hire me directly

Separate from the App Vending Machine — which builds software to order — I take on systems and networking engagements as a freelance engineer. Server and hypervisor builds, cloud and on-prem migrations, SAN and storage work, network design and rebuilds, firewall and VPN configuration, site-to-site connectivity, or an extra senior pair of hands when something is broken and needs to be right the first time.

Small business or enterprise, one-off project or ongoing support — tell me what you're running and what's hurting, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

01 Greenbuddy — greenbuddyai.com

Greenbuddy is a cloud-native application running on AWS. The front end and APIs lean on a stack of managed AWS services so the app scales without me babysitting servers. Amazon S3 handles object storage — user uploads, media, and static assets — served cheaply and durably. Amazon Cognito manages the whole identity layer: user sign-up, sign-in, token issuance, and secure session handling, so authentication is handled by a hardened managed service instead of hand-rolled code. The application data lives in PostgreSQL, giving Greenbuddy a solid relational backbone for structured data, relationships, and queries.

Put together, it's a clean modern architecture — Cognito at the door, S3 for the heavy files, Postgres for the source of truth — all stitched together in AWS so the app stays available and scales with demand.

02 faizonlove.com — with Faizon Love · demo.faizonlove.com

faizonlove.com is a project I built alongside comedian Faizon Love — part streaming platform, part virtual comedy club. The app delivers streaming content to viewers and recreates the feel of a live comedy room online, where an audience gathers around a performance instead of watching alone.

Under the hood it runs on a streaming-media pipeline: content is ingested, transcoded into adaptive bitrates, and delivered over a CDN so it plays smoothly on any connection, with the application layer handling the "club" experience — the shared rooms, the lineup, and the audience around each show. It's the intersection of media engineering and product: making live and on-demand content feel like a place you go, not just a video you press play on.

03 Bash Sports — Online Bowling — on Steam

Bash Sports Online Bowling is a multiplayer bowling game currently on Steam. The client is built in Unity, which drives the 3D physics, the lanes and pin behavior, the animation, and the cross-platform rendering that makes the game feel good to play.

Behind the client is real server infrastructure for the online side — the backend that handles matchmaking, player sessions, real-time game state between competitors, and persistence of profiles and progression. Shipping a live multiplayer title means running and scaling that infrastructure so games stay in sync and lag-free for players connecting from anywhere — it's where my systems background and my software work meet in one product.

04 The Gunna Show — gunnashow.com

The Gunna Show is Philadelphia's premier song battle league, and I built the platform it runs on — web and mobile. It's a full competition system rather than a brochure site: a live battle arena for streamed matchups, audience voting on active bouts, weight-class divisions with champions, an artist roster and judging panel, and leaderboards that rank both the artists and the supporters backing them.

Around the competition sits the social and commercial layer — "The Cookout" feed with clips, walls and live rooms; a wallet with in-app coins and a GS+ membership tier; and promo packages sold directly through the site. The same product ships as a native mobile app for iOS and Android alongside the web platform, so the audience can watch, vote and support from wherever they are.

05 Unico — Lead Software Engineer

I serve as Lead Software Engineer for Unico — announced here by SNK MVSX — working on their line of dedicated arcade hardware — the MVSX home arcade, the Arcade Stick Pro, and the MVS Mini. These aren't emulator front-ends bolted onto a PC; they're purpose-built consumer devices where the software has to boot fast, feel instant in the hand, and stay rock-solid in living rooms and arcades that never get a patch window.

The work spans the whole stack of a shipped device: the on-device system software and user interface players actually navigate, input handling where frame-accurate response is the entire point of the product, media and save handling, and the build and release process that turns all of it into firmware you can put in a box. It's the closest thing to my systems background and my software work landing in the same object — embedded engineering with a hard consumer deadline attached.