Join!

Subscribe and receive exclusive content directly from Ben:

Overview

I really enjoy securing, building, and automating IT infrastructure, while also guiding others in best practices and patterns. I’ve been doing this for over 17 years in both technical and leadership roles and love journeying together with others to solve complex problems.

I’ve consulted on many projects, both large and small to determine the best way to implement solutions across all facets of IT including software, networking, and hardware solutions.

I’m one of those rare people with a weird balance of being both left and right-brained. I play well with others, remain calm in emergencies, and am a top performer whether alone or working with a team.

These combined skills have given me the ability to swivel from deep technical issues, over to teaching complex concepts to my more business-minded colleagues.

“Then we must go pro!”

CIO

Professionally, I’ve overseen all information technology as CIO for a $250MM national construction company. It was there where I gained a ton of experience working with multiple technologies and people. I was the liason between business and IT to help them understand the value of IT solutions. I also coordinated and managed many projects by working with vendors, contractors and staff.

Ops, DevOps & Architecture

After working there, I moved to work for my church which is a much, much larger organization. It is there where I managed and engineered the operations & infrastructure around many high profile applications. I have migrated multiple Java applications from on-premise virtual machines over to a cloud-native PaaS platform. I also supported and troubleshot enterprise applications/microservices running in containers. This role included owning the application lifecycle across building, deploying, and all related configurations. Other things involved were researching, troubleshooting, logging, scaling, capacity planning, and root cause analysis—to name a few.

I’ve written many a script with bash, perl and python to help automate “all the things,” and to glue infrastructure together in a repeatable way.

I love jumping into deep technical dives for root cause analysis to get to the crux of difficult problems. I’ve been that crazy “Linux guy” for a long time, and know the ins-and-outs of all major operating systems. I’ve worked with containers, and know how to make them dance and sing. I will probably never give up vim or mutt because I love tools that work well. I enjoy writing and documenting with my preferred mediums being bold ink on 111 lb paper, or electronically in markdown in Github since it’s accessible anywhere, anytime.

InfoSec, Cybersecurity, and More Cyber

I love both Operations & Information Security, and feel that they are tightly intertwined. My opinion is that a developer or administrator who is security-minded is worth their weight in gold.

Security has always been an upfront consideration of what I do, rather than an afterthought. While in the ops/devops/architecture roles mentioned above, security has been at the core―from the application layer, down to the physical layer.

I have overseen and supported InfoSec efforts in the Curch’s Operations and Infrastructure portfolios, and made recommendations on how to secure things like data centers, servers, firewalls, and storage solutions.

My current role as an InfoSec Manager is supporting our Cloud, Data, Platform, and Service teams. This involves working with both vendors and solution teams to secure our cloud initiatives involving IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, IDaaS. It also includes our on-premise efforts of securing data and services.

A lot of what I do each day, is help others minimize risk by understanding people and technology.

Other Info

I’m just as comfortable behind the keyboard as I am presenting to a large crowd—Just give me time to prepare! I feel like I have a great sense of humor, always try to remain positive, and try to build & lift others up.

I’ve never been one to just sit on their laurels waiting for things to happen. I’m a top performer, and enjoy working with people, learning new things, and engineering cool solutions. Check out this page for recruiting information.

Blogging

This is a blog I have migrated around from different platforms since 2004. It went like this if I recall correctly:

• blogspot
• Openshift/Wordpress/MySQL
• Openshift/Ghost/MySQL
• Openshift/Github pages/Jekyll
• Netlify/Github pages/Jekyll/LetsEncrypt

A lot of the posts are little things that myself or others could refer to when faced with similar situations.

What is Your Logo for Hoyvin-Glaivin’s Sake?

One of my favorite childhood movies was Krull. I watched the film many a time, had a cardgame, and just thought the premise was so amazing. It included:

• ☑ Fantastical creatures with magical powers.
• ☑ Intergalactic spaceships.
• ☑ Liam Neeson before anyone knew who he was.

The main weapon in the film was the “Glaive.” It was such a cool looking thing for my young eyes to behold. It had magical powers, and a sense of awe and wonder about it. It’s what you would get if a boomerang & shuriken had a baby. Not to be confused with Oddjob’s hat in that one James Bond film.