All Systems Argo: A Journey Through Technology, Security, and Storytelling
There’s something poetic about the phrase All Systems Argo.
When I registered this domain years ago, it was a playful mashup:
“All Systems Are Go” — the phrase you hear before a rocket launch — and Jason and the Argonauts, my dad’s favorite story. The name “Argonaut” became the root for “Astronaut,” the explorers of the stars. It felt fitting: I was building systems, launching new ideas, and venturing into the unknown.
This site started as a place to document fixes, commands, and configurations — the everyday notes of a systems engineer. Over time, it became something more: a reflection of how each season of my career shaped not just what I do, but who I am.
2009–2011 | The Launch Phase
My IT career began the way most adventures do — unexpectedly.
When our sysadmin left, I stepped in to fill the void. I didn’t have all the answers — far from it — but I had the curiosity (and maybe just enough stubbornness) to figure things out. My biggest challenge wasn’t technical; it was political. Convincing the CEO to invest in backend infrastructure wasn’t easy when “it still works” was the budget strategy.
We were running on an IBM BladeCenter that couldn’t even support vMotion between blades. The previous engineers seemed to believe that if you just plugged in enough UTP cables, eventually the packets would find their way home.
We went from a barely functioning four-blade chassis to a five-host ESXi cluster with 2 TB of RAM — and suddenly, stability wasn’t a luxury, it was our baseline. Every server rebuild, DNS hiccup, and backup failure became a lesson in resilience.
Those early years taught me the rhythm of infrastructure — the heartbeat of every organization.
2011–2016 | Building the Backbone
These were the foundation years — the years of late nights, steep learning curves, and unexpected victories.
I walked in halfway through a P2V migration in VMware VI3, eventually pushing forward to ESX 4.x and beyond. Somewhere in that blur, I discovered the beauty (and occasional brutality) of Dell Compellent Storage Arrays — robust technology backed by world-class support.
I broke Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP more times than I’d care to admit, but I always found a way through — the hard way — and came out the other side like a seasoned MCITP. The shift from x86 to x64 nearly did me (and our legacy systems) in, but it forced me to learn what real infrastructure resilience meant.
I soaked up everything: Cisco firewalls, SQL Server backups, Group Policy battles — the unglamorous but essential systems that keep the lights on. I learned that good IT isn’t about perfection; it’s about reliability. It’s about waking up at 2 a.m. when a service goes down and fixing it before anyone notices.
(Yes, that really happened. Also, Mumbai is 9.5 hours ahead of Pacific Time — a fact I’ll never forget.)
Looking back, those years were the scaffolding that would hold up everything I’d build later.
2016–2019 | The Security Awakening
Then came the ransomware era.
Just before the SamSam attack crippled Atlanta, we were hit — and we survived. That experience changed everything. It wasn’t just about systems anymore; it was about defense, about learning to think like an adversary.
I learned fast that backups are useless once they’re encrypted, and that letting snapshots (or “Replays,” as we called them back then) expire after 2 days is a terrible idea. When you walk in on a Monday morning to a fire that’s been burning since Friday night, you learn the value of an immutable snapshot from Thursday — one that, quite literally, saved the company.
That success opened doors. Job offers started landing in my inbox, but instead of chasing titles, I focused on growth. Around that time, I completely bombed a Linux Admin interview — and it humbled me. (To be fair, the recruiter probably should’ve said Linux Admin, not Windows Admin —but I digress.)
Rather than walk away, I decided to master what I didn’t know. That decision led me to Hack The Box, where I clawed my way from Script Kiddie to Hacker—a journey that rewired how I approached security.
Along the way, I earned the RITx MicroMasters in Cybersecurity, diving into Network Security, Risk Management, and Forensics, applying every lesson directly to real-world systems.
That season taught me one of the most valuable truths in both IT and life:
Failure isn’t a verdict — it’s a teacher.
2019–2023 | Leadership and Modernization
By this time, I had moved into a Director role — leading IT infrastructure and cybersecurity across multiple datacenters and Azure environments.
We modernized the backbone:
- Migrated on-prem systems to hybrid cloud.
- BGP/IPSec Tunnels between colocation sites.
- Integrated Sentinel, Defender, and Arctic Wolf into a living SOC ecosystem.
- Implemented Zero Trust principles before they were buzzwords. MFA everywhere.
- Hardened and rebuilt what once was fragile.
In 2022, I partnered with our Data Science team to build an on-prem High Compute AI/ML Kubernetes cluster running on VMware and Ubuntu with 4×Tesla V100S GPUs. We secured it, released it into production, and watched it become the foundation of our machine learning pipeline.
Those were the years I realized technology isn’t static — it’s alive.
2024–Present | The Next Horizon
Today, I’m still learning, still building, still exploring.
I’m pursuing my CISSP and developing new ideas like SwarmDefense — a vision for dynamic, AI-driven honeypots designed to waste attackers’ time while training smarter defenses.
It’s not just about keeping bad actors out; it’s about using their attacks to make us stronger.
Projects like Prism Node, SwarmDefense, and the creative storytelling of Kingdom & Fire are all part of the same thread: finding the balance between systems, faith, and the human story at the center of it all.
Because for me, it’s never been just about technology — it’s about redemption, resilience, and renewal.
Hobbies | The Lab After Hours
Some people unwind by watching TV — I build systems.
At one point, that meant designing and deploying a 10-node crypto mining farm running HiveOS with 66 GPUs. I treated it like a data center: tuned power efficiency, optimized airflow, tracked hash rates, and built dashboards to monitor temps and uptime.
It was loud, hot, and a little insane — but it scratched the same itch that IT and security do: designing, troubleshooting, and optimizing systems at scale.
That project taught me about resource management, automation, and resilience — lessons that still apply to how I approach cybersecurity infrastructure today.
Closing Thoughts
This isn’t just a resume in blog form — it’s a reminder.
That the systems we build mirror the people who build them.
That every breach, every fix, every lesson learned is a chance to grow stronger.
So whether it’s code, story, or song —
All Systems Argo.
Because the mission isn’t over.
All Systems (Are) Go. 