About this site
Hey, I'm David.
I've spent 25+ years running IT for high-growth Bay Area tech companies. I started on the front lines, imaging machines and answering shoulder taps, and worked my way up to leading distributed teams across multiple time zones.
How it started
It started the way it does for a lot of us, with one machine and a manual. I got my hands on a Mac, picked up the thickest book I could find about it, and read it cover to cover, more than once. That habit never left. Most of my career comes down to the same move, dig in until you actually understand how the thing works.
What I do
Identity is the through line. I've pulled identity and access under one platform at multiple companies, with provisioning, lifecycle automation, and access governance behind it. I take over fragmented environments and make them work. Off outsourced models, identity under control, real process behind incident and change.
My operating philosophy is simple. Customers come first, but the best thing you can do is empower somebody to self-serve before they ever open a ticket. Document everything. Automate what repeats. Drive ticket volume as close to zero as it'll go. Say you've got 100 recurring tickets a month. Write the doc that kills the top repeat, that's 20 gone, now we're at 80. Automate the next one, now we're at 60. Keep going until the queue turns the tide. That's the job.
And when I hire, I hire for customer service instinct first. I can teach somebody the stack. I can't teach them to care.
What I'm doing now
Lately I've been going deep on one question: where does AI actually fit in IT operations? I rebuilt my home network end to end with AI tooling, VLAN segmentation, encrypted DNS, IDS/IPS, automated certificate issuance, and I run an MCP server that reports read-only health across the whole stack. I've also learned where the tooling breaks. Confident wrong answers are still wrong answers, and I write about those too.
Why this blog
Because documenting everything isn't just a work rule, it's how I think. This is where I share what I'm learning: AI in IT operations, homelab builds, and the occasional leadership lesson from 25+ years of doing this.
Off the clock
Traveling, tinkering, golf, family time, video games, and chasing whatever new thing catches my attention. Usually in that order, sometimes all at once.