Thomas’s goal in his career was to become the potato. Rather than being the expert at one thing , he has always strived to be “good” doing a lot of different things. His education combined computer science and business administration. His career so far has spanned twenty years and some of the biggest computer makers on the planet.
Thomas’s first professional IT project saved the department USD 48,000 on a 50,000 budget. The winning combination was Linux, CGI/HTML, Perl, Windows and the Internet. At the time, HTML was a weird 4 letter acronym nobody knew existed, and the browser of choice was NCSA Mosaic. (Before Netscape).
Thomas started working at Digital Equipment Corporation doing UNIX and OpenVMS phone support. Advising and implementing ERP software infrastructure was spiced up with management responsibilities. Then, just as the world exhaled after Y2K, Thomas along with his wife, dog, and cat moved to across the pond to the US of A.
Once settled, Thomas’s career continued to include companies like Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and NetApp. He’s had Product Management/Planning responsibility for Enterprise UNIX high availability and storage solutions. He’s spent time in an engineering level support role. Did a couple of years as an engineering level “fly ‘n fix” consultant, but it left him a little sick of travel. Since then, he enjoyed life with product and process improvements. Thomas has allways worked with some of his employers most strategic and important customers.
Other roles include Product Planning and Program Management for HP’s Business Critical Linux solutions. Being a Sustaining Engineering Program Manager for Dell, Thomas built/coded product quality prediction tools. Programming reminded him of how much he enjoyed computer science. It also reminded him of why he started at Digital Equipment Corporation in the first place. After a few years, Thomas figured it was time to leave the big company life behind.
In what may seem like a detour, Thomas decided to become a Certified Personal Trainer. And a certified Master Nutrition Coach. ‘Cause that’s what you do when you’re “successful” in IT, apparently.
These days Thomas enjoys a much more relaxed lifestyle on his own terms. Thomas is still programming, but only for the kinds of projects he finds interesting. Right now, that means WordPress based solutions. Membership sites. Custom WordPress plugins, and other web based freelance programming projects.
He’s not at all happy this bio was written in the third person!