A practical route into technology
I am a technical support engineer based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, with more than fifteen years of experience across customer-facing support, telecommunications, leadership, and infrastructure engineering.
My route into technology was not entirely linear. I began studying computer science at the University of New Brunswick, but gradually recognized that I was less interested in programming as the centre of my career than in working directly with systems. I wanted to understand how servers, networks, operating systems, and infrastructure behaved in the real world, so I moved into a more hands-on Information Systems Specialist program at Eastern College.
There is some irony in where that decision led. I did not want development to be my entire job, yet I now regularly build scripts, utilities, websites, data systems, and applications when they are the right tools for solving a practical problem. Coding became part of how I work rather than the definition of what I do.
Support began with people
Before the more technical titles, I worked directly with customers. Full-service fuel and convenience-store work taught me how to communicate face to face, manage money accurately, handle competing demands, and remain helpful in conditions that were not always comfortable. A later customer-support role added experience handling service and technical concerns in a structured contact-centre environment.
Those foundations still matter. A technically correct answer can fail if it is not communicated clearly, if expectations are not managed, or if the person affected does not feel that anyone has taken ownership. Good support requires both technical judgment and an understanding of the human situation around the technology.
Growing through technical support and leadership
At Innovatia, I spent a decade supporting Avaya environments and progressed through Technical Support Specialist, TSS POD Lead, Principal Support Specialist, and Interim Technical Services Manager responsibilities.
The progression was not a simple climb from one title to the next. Organizational changes replaced the POD Lead structure with a smaller number of management positions, and moving into the Principal Support Specialist role was a lateral transition that kept me close to technical work until an interim management opening became available. Across those roles, I supported customers, coached team members, coordinated workload and escalations, contributed to knowledge development, and gained a broader view of how technical-service teams operate.
I joined StorMagic in 2022 and returned my daily focus to hands-on engineering. My work now centres on storage, virtualization, Linux-based systems, networking, and high-availability environments across VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. The leadership experience came with me: it continues to shape how I organize difficult cases, communicate impact, collaborate across teams, and remain steady when the technical problem is also a serious customer problem.
How I approach difficult problems
I prefer evidence before assumptions. That means establishing a reliable timeline, understanding the environment, identifying what changed, and separating the first visible symptom from the underlying cause.
Infrastructure incidents rarely remain inside one neat boundary. Storage behaviour may depend on networking, virtualization, operating systems, hardware, workload, configuration, or timing. I work to organize those moving parts into an investigation that customers and colleagues can follow.
Principles that guide the work
- Gather and preserve evidence before committing to a conclusion.
- Test assumptions and distinguish confirmed facts from reasonable possibilities.
- Explain uncertainty honestly while maintaining a useful direction.
- Keep the customer’s actual impact and priorities in view.
- Document findings so that another person can continue the work.
- Turn technical detail into clear, practical next steps.
Communication, education, and perspective
My education spans computer science studies, formal information-systems training, and a theology diploma. They developed different but complementary abilities: analytical thinking, careful reading, public speaking, structured writing, and explaining complicated ideas to people with different levels of background knowledge.
Technical documentation has become an important part of my work. Earlier in my career, that often meant concise symptom, cause, and resolution articles. Today it also includes longer procedural and explanatory material designed to help readers understand not only what to do, but how a system behaves and what outcomes to expect.
Building beyond the day job
Outside my primary employment, I maintain projects involving historical sports data, digital publishing, website management, media production, and application development. Some began with a specific unanswered question; others grew from seeing a process that could be made easier or a platform that could be made more useful.
These projects give me room to work across the full lifecycle: defining the need, organizing information, choosing an approach, building and testing the result, publishing it, and maintaining it over time. I use AI assistance where it adds value and disclose that involvement rather than treating assisted work as entirely hand-coded.
Since 2014, I have overseen live sound, media presentation, video recording, publishing, equipment upgrades, and real-time technical troubleshooting for a local church community. I also served as Youth Pastor from 2015 to 2018, developing further experience in teaching, public speaking, planning, and community leadership. These responsibilities combine technology and communication with the practical requirement that systems remain understandable and dependable for the people using them.