Fark.com is a popular comedy news aggregation website, getting tens of millions of page views per month. It's won several awards over its lifetime (for example, PC World's 2002 Best Recreational/Entertainment site), is an easter egg in (among others) Toy Story 3 and Doom 3, and was even a "Jeopardy!" category twice.I oversaw the technical side of its growth, handling all hardware, scaling, networking, and security, as we grew from a side project sharing a server, into millions of pageviews per month on a 15 server cluster. Software and UI design and DBA tasks were handled by a small (two full time including myself, one part time) team; lower level stuff like hardware and OS administration remained my sole responsibility.More recently, in June-July 2019, I moved the entire hardware stack to a mix of AWS and DigitalOcean cloud hosting -- by myself. Then moved it again in late 2022 from DigitalOcean to a split of Linode and Vultr, also solo.Initially part time, until growth made it a full time gig in January 2006.

Win.net is a locally owned ISP and telecom provider in central Kentucky, mostly serving the Louisville metro area. I was part of the engineering team, overseeing hardware and software, security, and of course networking (because that's the core of what ISP's do). I helped integrate multiple acquired ISP's (including my previous employer), all running multiple mail systems, web systems on multiple operating systems, billing systems, modem pools, router vendors, etc. into a single, cohesive, redundant system, while minimizing customer impact.

Digital Crescent (dcr.net) was a locally owned ISP in central Kentucky, mostly providing 56K dialup, ADSL, and T1's in rural areas of central Kentucky that other ISPs tended to ignore. (Specifically, the Frankfort, Lawrenceburg, Owenton, and Shelbyville areas.) I became essentially the entire engineering team, doing all the hardware and software setup and maintenance. Infrastructure was based on FreeBSD servers, Cisco routers, and USRobotics Total Control modem pools.Their assets were acquired by Win.net on 1-Apr-2002.Fark.com began here as a side project by Digital Crescent's founder in early 1999. It was moved to another ISP some time prior to the Win.net acquisition.

Hired during senior year, delaying graduation. I stayed on 8 months after graduation, until I got an offer to move home to get into the ISP business.My initial project was to do some small parts of a port of their database system (Datatel's Colleague) from a Prime 9955-II to an NCR Unix system, then to reconfigure that same database for the school's conversion from 12-week trimesters to 18-week semesters. Later, I did the academic system's DEC OpenVMS port from VAX hardware to Alpha hardware completely by myself. I organized a small loose-knit team to build the school's very first (and back then, very crude) website. On the side, assisted with some network administration (primarily Cisco and Xyplex gear), technical support for faculty, staff, and students, and some unwanted internal political wrangling.