Jumping The Gun

I was so excited to publish the post about The Command Line that I forgot to establish my credentials. Which is to say that you should be asking "Who is this guy?!” and "Why should I listen to him?!".

I've written out the answers to these questions. In doing so, however, I realized that this was a MUCH longer story than I anticipated once I put cursor to editor. To save you, reader, the emotions you may feel while going through mandatory new hire HR trainings, I've divided it up into 6 parts which will be published over the next several emails. I hope that my story will provide some needed context for what I'm trying to accomplish so, without delaying further...

Who Is This Guy?!

My name is Darrell Tang and while some of you may know me personally, some may not. Since I've decided to center this newsletter around the things that matter the most to me; DevOps practices, technology, personal hobbies, and the meta-analysis of life in general, I thought it would be helpful to understand my background and the story that got me here. It may or may not be interesting in the general sense, but it's interesting to ME so here we go.

In the beginning...

I found my very, very first tech position at a hosted VoIP company. This was back in 2010 after scavenging in the economic aftermath of the Great Recession for 2 years, so I was absolutely thrilled to be working at any stable employment (sold a lot of stuff on Craigslist). Everything was going great until that stability became the victim of some budget cuts which meant that I was cut a mere 3 months into the position. Not a great start.

Luckily, I was able to take that morsel of VoIP experience and get hired just a few months later at another hosted VoIP provider & internet service provider (ISP). It was quite a good package, they could bundle the VoIP service along with the internet and control the QoS to provide a much better audio quality which was a weakness of VoIP at the time. I learned a lot at this position and obtained my CCNA certification while there, which started me on a great path to be a Certified Network Engineer!

Part 2 next time! Keep learning and keep growing!

Darrell