Almost ten years ago I interviewed with this guy named Mike Murphy for a Senior Network Admin job at the West Virginia Housing Development Fund. I’d been laid off from my previous employer due to plant closure and had been on unemployment for a while. What was supposed to be a 1 hour interview took almost 2 hours and we hit it off pretty well. He has been one of the best managers I’ve ever had and more importantly, a friend.

For the past ten years under Mike’s leadership I’ve been allowed to do some very cool things in my role there; learn about things like VMware vSphere, Veeam Backup and Replication, and cloud computing while making the computing infrastructure for The Fund the best I could make it. I also got to get into this thing called the “tech community” and it has truly changed my career trajectory.

I’ve been extremely lucky to be included in things like vExpert and the Veeam Vanguards, learning to engage and give back as much as possible to those communities with my own viewpoints and knowledge. For what I’ve given it will never match what I’ve got back; the range of ideas, the challenges of my own beliefs, and frankly the friendships. In short it has given me the opportunity to be a better version of myself. Thanks in a very large part to that tech community after almost ten years it is finally time for me to be moving on.

I am extremely excited to say that I will soon become Senior Cloud Architect for OffsiteDataSync, now a part of J2 Global. I’ve been associated in a few ways with ODS for years but I have a great deal of thanks to fellow Vanguard Brad Jervis, who made the introduction and who I will soon be working side by side with. My tech loves have been mostly Veeam and VMware for quite some time now so it’s very exciting to take what I’ve learned and apply it at a much grander scale.

In addition to the new technical challenges in this new role I’m now going to be in a position to be much more socially active so expect to see quite a bit more content here in the future as I learn and grow into this new role. It’s already looking like it’s going to be a fun ride, I can’t wait to get on!