My Story...

The chronology below is the story of my professional and IT life experiences. I believe it is important to understand an individuals unique "story", what sparked the passion, how they ended up in IT and where they have been. My broad experiences have been invaluable and are a big reason I have experienced the success I have up to now in my IT career. Although, I am on the fringe age wise, I do consider myself a "Digital Native".

Chronology

1976 - Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA

~1985 - Sandia National Laboratories - Attended "Family Day" both my parents worked at the Labs and retired although not college educated they exposed me to a new world of science and technology.

1987 - Discovered the Apple II's and Macintosh's at my middle school computer club.

1989 - Learned to type in middle school ;) - I think this is important as it is a pet peeve of mine when an IT professional can't type.. 

1991 - Sandia Summer Science Camp - Met my future wife here, oh and was exposed to a bunch of "Science" stuff too..

1991 - First Home PC, IBM Clone with 40MB hard drive (my sister paid like $3600 for it I still remember that) got online started using Telnet, Veronica, Archie, Lynx(ahh.. nothing like browsing in text ;) )

1992 - Somewhere in here starting coding in qbasic at home (this was fun)

1993 - Introduction to Computing class - IBM PS2's no hard drives, had to learn to carry around my DOS boot disks in high school, learned to use Edlin, DOS etc. ;)

1993 - High School Summer Intern at Sandia National Laboratories, worked on creating a Visual FoxPro app/db, first exposure to corporate networked environment, email on a windows 3.x box (my home computer didn't have Windows). I was able to see some supercomputers the  Intel Paragon and a Cray Y-MP in person, those were the days of the "cool looking" supercomputers.

1993-94 - Adventures in Supercomputing (AIS) - Got my first UNIX account on a Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Labs, tried to learn FORTRAN 90

1994 - Summer Internship #2 at Sandia National Laboratories, doing computer support, learned all about Novell networking, IPX/SPX stack, crimping and running network cables, installing network cards and generally learning about PC Hardware.

1994-95 - AIS/New Mexico Supercomputer Challenge - I was in both they were two different programs as I remember them. My teams never really did very well although learned a bunch about UNIX,X-Windows, Programming and the Internet.

1995 - Summer Internship #3 at Sandia National Laboratories, more desktop support, started learning about TCO of desktops and other IT Management concepts,  cleaned viruses, upgraded computers started doing some programming.

1995 - Started Computer Science Program at New Mexico Tech - received a small computer science scholarship - More UNIX, more XWindows, learned Turing, my professor said at the time; "once you know how to program changing languages is only syntax" - so true. 

1996 - Switched  to the University of New Mexico and changed my major to Management Information Systems at the Anderson School of Management - My previous experiences taught me that my passion was with Business Technology vs. hard core Computer Science.

1996 - Started working as full time College Intern at Sandia National Labs for the next 4 years - 20hrs/week during active Semesters and 40 hrs a week every time else. Learned the tricks of the trade, more support, hardware, server management.

1997 - Attended/Selected Volunteer W3C WWW6 in Santa Clara, California - basically if you got selected you had to work (Support, Hardware, Cabling) for free conference registration etc.

1997 - Microsoft Certified Professional: MCP in NT 4.0 workstation, server in the enterprise ...  (everyone I worked with was a MCSE so just following suite)

1998 - W3C WWW7 in Brisbane, Australia

1998 - @ SNL starting building Database backed Web Sites with ASP, built CMS system for Department Intranet site, transitioning to programming full time. 

1998 - Co-Founded and President of Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) Student Chapter at University of New Mexico

1998 - Visual Interdev class in Boston, more ASP/Dynamic Web Site programming

1998 - @ SNL built Web Based Support ticket management system  w/ SQL back-end, Primarily doing Web Development and Server Management

1999 - W3C WWW8 in Toronto, Canada

1999 - December - Graduated with BBA w/ MIS Concentration

1999 - Planning on Graduate School focusing on MOT and Strategic Management but instead accepted a job with COMPAQ Computer in Houston TX, turned down IBM twice in Silicon Valley, cost of living too high, salary offer too low ;). 

2000 - W3C WWW9 in Amsterdam, Netherlands

2000 - Ariba Live Conference - Miami Beach - COMPAQ first "Ariba Ready" Supplier - I believe I went to 3 Ariba Conferences, was on the eprocurement team at Compaq so heavy into eProcurement/B2B  specialization.

2003 - Microsoft Tech Ed - Dallas, Texas - Executive Track - nothing like the "executive track" my manager at the time gave me his slot.  - started great relationship with the Microsoft guys here in South Region, often attend the Microsoft Architecture Council sessions.

2003 - ASP Connections - New Orleans, Louisiana

2004 - PMP Certified - Project Management Institute

2005 - Microsoft National Architects Conference - Vail, Colorado

2006 - Microsoft Strategic Architecture Forum - Redmond, Washington

2007 - Web 2.0 Expo - San Francisco, California

2007 - HP Tech Con - Internal HP Tech Conference, Received invite and co-facilitated several Web 2.0 Birds of a Feather Sessions.