I am Nathan V. I am an experienced IT, operations, and security professional with a history covering time in big Fortune 50 type companies as well as startups- even one with less than 50 employees. I am a work in progress, just like this site. My skills and experience are varied and somewhat eclectic. I’ve carried the titles of Application Engineer, Operations Engineer, Systems Engineer, Support Engineer, Technical Support Engineer, Systems Administrator, Information Assurance NCO, Computer Defense Assistance Program Analyst, Security Engineer, Principal Devops Engineer, and more that are just as exciting and ambiguous.
Perhaps a more valuable bit of information is that I’ve worked on systems ranging from Windows 3.11 to Ubuntu Server 20.04 and many things between. I presently use and maintain Linux and Windows servers as well as various client operating systems. I’ve run Xen, VMWare, Hyper-V, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual machines in production. I’ve configured and installed NetApp and EMC SANs over fiber and iSCSI and am a certified Nimble Storage administrator. I’m deeply familiar with AWS services and technologies with more than a decade of cloud experience. I’ve worked on mission-critical production databases, front-ends, backup solutions, load balancers, networking devices, and more. I completed the Server+ certification while working in a 2500+ server datacenter.
Beyond the operations side of things I’ve completed the Security+ certification as well as many military security certifications. I’ve studied and taken classes for CEH, CASP, and CISSP though I never bothered with the exams. I similarly completed the Amazon Web Services Solutions Architecture class but didn’t take the test since it wasn’t really beneficial at the time. I’ve completed hundreds of hours of military training courses and have more Army certifications than I know what to do with. I’ve identified and exploited critical vulnerabilities in information systems. I’ve written and enforced company policies affecting thousands.
When I originally created this site I wasn’t much of a developer. I had dabbled a bit in PHP and some Perl and had eventually gone on to do some fun things with each but had never really done any serious development work. That has changed in the last few years. I’ve since spent years of my time writing services and automation in Ruby and Python and a fair amount of code that is still in production today driving services or simply as tools to get a job done. One of those services, today, is deployed internationally and is a business-critical function that enables the viewing, monitoring, managing, and configuring of a critical customer-facing service.
I’m quite enjoying development and look forward to more opportunities to use these skills in varying settings. I hope to be able to share some of the things I’ve been working on through this site though NDAs and company IP concerns usually prevent sharing what I’m doing day to day.
If you have any further questions about me please feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to help if I can. Employment or consulting inquiries can be submitted in that format as well.
-Nathan