I’ve been a Technical Geek for 30 years starting out programming in Basic then dBase and on to Clipper Summer 87, Foxbase and Foxpro. I wrote an inventory program for a small furniture company back in the mid 80’s. The moved on to work with a reseller setting up remote offices and moonlighting for them, fixing programs written by other developers that dropped out of the picture. After working there a few years I moved to a medium sized ($150 M) corporation and rewrote their in-house sales, inventory and shipping systems. Then as they grew and got bought by another corporation we moved that system to a canned package called ManManX with an Oracle 7.2 DB. After successfully migrating to that system and going into maintenance mode my boss and I were looking for bigger challenges and he moved to a huge corporation in the mid 90’s that wanted to move off their homegrown Mainframe system to an open system running an Oracle ERP system on their Alpha GUI called SmartClient. That was quite a challenge with many remote manufacturing plants all over North America. I was the guy with all the hats setting up the HP 9000 to run Oracle DB’s, also specifying and deploying a completely new network for a few million square foot plant, specifying and deploying new workstations to all users, and building a new data-center for the new equipment we needed to host everything. Started hiring help as I was running myself ragged trying to keep all the balls in the air. The only way I could get the constantly changing GUI to all the plants was to setup a large Citrix farm with over a hundred servers allowing users all over North America to run the newest build of the GUI client quickly, buy then it was in Beta and doing major updates weekly. Long story short we were very successful. After the dot com crash I took over the Citrix cluster from corporate and merged the two farms serving 500+ applications in two large data-centers, one in NY the other in San Diego. After a few Citrix version upgrades then moving all the servers onto VMware I was promoted to manage all the customer facing websites infrastructure. B2B and B2C at its largest capacity we had 550 servers, mostly VMs running primarily Redhat Linux for web application and db tiers. We moved from Cisco load-balance’s to F5’s and later deployed the ASM module to do layer 7 monitoring and blocking of http & https exploits. The in 2010 the large corporation decided to outsource operations to India. That was a bit more difficult than anticipated and my planned separation date came and went, after 5 years of managing them our parent organization wanted control and outsourced to a different India organization. We thought the first one was horrific, but the new crew made in retrospect the prior crew look like rocket scientists. I spent 18 more months answering the same exact questions over and over again with the new crew who never could find any of the 6 months of knowledge transfer documentation and I was totally ready when my final day came.
Now I am traveling the country in a 40′ motorhome.
I am part of the Amazon Affiliate Program and will earn a pittance if you purchase anything thru my links. I do not recommend anything I wouldn’t purchase again. I personally buy all items that I recommend. I get nothing for free. (at least not yet 🙂 ) If you purchase something via my link to Amazon you pay the exact same as I would pay for it. The affiliate links help pay for the domain name and yearly hosting. I think I am providing help to folks reading these, they are things I had to learn the hard way. -Bill