Hi! I’m Patrick. I’m a human living on the east coast of the US. I like stereotypical human things like coffee, modes of transport, pictures, and more. I grew up around computers, so my life is one of those “a fun thing became my day job” stories. There are good and bad aspects to this! These days, I try to stick to small fun projects outside of work and leave the majority of things I’d want to work on to the work week; I’m fortunate enough to have the flexibility to determine that some days.

I enjoy shooting landscapes and scenery. You can see those pictures on flickr and on Instagram, though I don’t post to the grid that often.

Work Stuff

I’m a Director of Engineering at F5 through their acquisition of Threat Stack, a Boston-based startup that offered cloud-optimized security observability. We collected system calls, processed them, and alerted on them. It was a simple and effective product in the security field, which was rare. Threat Stack (or App Infrastructure Protection, as it was renamed) is no more. Today I manage a team that is building out a data platform for collecting, storing, and forwarding data that is built on top of the components used to process a million system calls+ per second.

Past Affiliations

I was an Associate Staff member of the Secure and Resilient Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I worked on the Lincoln Laboratory Secure and Resilient Cloud (LLSRC) program - along with other modern infrastructure computing initiatives. LLSRC was a little bit of OpenStack, a little bit Joyent’s SmartDataCenter, and we made some neat software that bootstraps trust in cloud environments. Introducing researchers to API-driven compute given some unique security constraints was fun. I was a coauthor on a few papers as well.

Prior to that, I was IT Staff in the Advanced Lasercom Systems and Operations group (also at Lincoln Laboratory). I helped run a laboratory-wide HPC network used in creating and simulating brand new hardware - think full-custom ASICs, sensors, and more. I also built infrastructure for various mission-critical field tests, the coolest one being for the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration.

Before my time at the Lab, I did a mix of home computer repair, IT work for my high school, and managed my local town hall’s IT needs. I also made a popular website a long time ago. I don’t really have the time for consulting these days, but you can read more about that on the Big Technology site.

Formal Education

Much of what I’ve learned is from trying things out, breaking things, and putting them back together again. But I also have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Networking and Information Systems from Wentworth Institute of Technology, and a Masters in Networking and System Administration from Rochester Institute of Technology.

About This Site

It’s a Hugo site with the hello-friend-ng theme, which was created by Djordje Atlialp.