Hi! I’m Patrick. I’m a human living in Portland, Oregon. I like stereotypical human things like coffee, modes of transport, pictures, and more. 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 looking for a new full-time role!

I’ve done many things to make complex technology easy for people and organizations to hold, both as an individual contributor and an executive in the security engineering and site reliability engineering space. I’ve managed and built out IT for a small town (I had a budget as a high school student), figured out how to safely and securely take a tax firm into the cloud (in the mid-2000s, before remote work was a way of life), and created repeatable patterns to deploy servers and workstations in support of creating CCDs, ASICs, and FPGAs in the national interest. I built a linux-based platform for running some controller code that is allegedly still in use.

At Threat Stack I created a whole bunch of security and operations tooling for a SaaS based security startup (many of which are on this site), deployed centralized IAM, learned how to run ES and Kafka, helped link cloud spend to unit economics, and worked on an acquisition. And in my last role at F5 I sponsored and contributed to building a telemetry collection pipeline in use by products you’ve probably heard of if you’ve balanced load, and managed a team of 9 more senior ICs. I’ve also regularly worked on conferences for my field - first LISA, and now SREcon.

My skill set is not for every organization – but if you think it’d be a fit for your organization, I’d love to meet up and chat about what you’re building, the organization you’re building it in, and how I might help. I’m primarily leaning towards executive roles where I’d be able to make an impact and grow alongside other leaders. I also consult, and you can read more about that on Big Technology’s website.

Past Affiliations

I was 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. I managed 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 and alert on over a million system calls per second.

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.