about me
Hello. I'm Travis. I want to provide you some brief details about me as they relate to my career.
I have always been interested in technology since the early days of DOS and even before. I even had a Commodore 64 at some point, but never could fully understand how to use it. I started using mainstream PCs with Windows 98. I wasn't online until a little while later. Actually, when I was 11 I created and maintained my first website about a cartoon I really liked at the time. That was my first real venture into HTML.
From that point on I grew in my love and interest for technology. I had many different types of computers at my house, I built a few, repaired a few for friends and everything in between. When I was in high-school, I had a job as a stock boy at a local business. The web designer left and my boss discovered I had a knack for websites and I got the position. I learned CSS, XHTML, PHP and SQL from different sources and applied my skills at my job. I did dozens of other tasks, but doing the websites was my main job.
After high-school, I decided to attend Central Pennsylvania College for IT. I found out that I didn't like the art side of web design, so I decided to go further into computers rather than art. I have made great connections at school as well as learned a lot of excellent IT material.
One of the connections I made at the school helped me get my first position as a Citrix Server Specialist at the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. I started working at the court as an intern, but eventually was offered the technician position working in the exciting virtual world of Citrix products. I worked with Citrix XenApp, XenServer, Provisioning Services and NetScaler among other Citrix products. Along with Citrix products I also work extensively with Windows Server products as well (2003, 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012, 2012 R2).
I eventually moved on from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts to The Asbury Group Integrated Technologies where I served as a system administrator covering a gamut of technologies including Citrix, VMware, SANs, backups with VEEAM, anything Microsoft and so many others. I continued at Asbury for a number of years and continued to help their customers implement enterprise IT solutions.
In 2017 I completed my journey and obtained my masters degree from Johns Hopkins in Information Technology Engineering. It was a long journey, but it was well worth it.
In 2018 I moved onto Penn State Health, a large healthcare provider in the central PA area. There I served as a senior system engineer. My focus is maintaining the very large Windows and VMware infrastructure. Standardizations, maintenance, design, implementation, upgrades, architecture, troubleshooting and much more encompass my daily roll there.
In 2020 I moved onto Webstaurantstore as an SRE working with the website. This was a shift for me coming from purely infrastructure to now a role where I work with more software, automation and programming in addition to infrastructure. I'm learning a ton of new tech here such as GitLab, Docker, Ansible, Prometheus/Grafana, Concourse and so many more. I hope to continue my growth here and am excited for what I've already learned.
I continue to do side-work for the company I worked for while in high school and college. My focus nowadays is email campaigns – optimizations, inbox placement, design, strategies, etc.
I began teaching as an adjunct IT professor at Central Penn college in summer 2017. I have enjoyed teaching others IT. I emphasize hands-on exercises with my students. Classes I have taught include – IT Project Management, Networking II, Microcomputer Systems, Operating Systems and Firewalls and Intrusion Detection.
I am a highly-motivated person, so I always have a thirst for learning. I have many industry certifications. You can see my LinkedIn for an updated list. I’m actively pursuing more learning and certifications for cloud-based technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Linux and others. Cloud is truly the future for IT as a whole. I feel that my strong work ethic, motivation, ability to learn and outlook will make my skills a valuable asset to any company. For more information about me, check out my resume page or the contact me page.
Thanks
- Committed
- Motivated
- Quick to Learn