Bash99

Elementary school. Texas Instruments in the classroom. Every other kid was playing games. I was writing BASIC — making the screen flash colors, making it beep. The teacher pulled me aside for wasting time. I was 11. I tested at the 99th percentile for logic that year. I didn't know what that meant. I just built things.

Nothing has changed.

At home we had our own TI — that's where I practiced. When we graduated to a Windows PC, my dad had one rule: if my brother and I broke the OS — and we broke it constantly — we fixed it ourselves. No exceptions. Reload the OS, figure it out, or it stays broken. That's still how I operate. Break things. Understand why. Put it back together better.

I got my first job at 15 and a half — workers permit, waiting tables, helping the family keep the lights on and buying computer parts with whatever was left. I've never stopped working since. Bartended through school. Did what needed doing. That's not a complaint — that's a baseline.

By my early twenties I was so burned out on computers I deliberately walked away. Got my real estate license. Made six figures. Thought I was out. Then the brokerages figured out I could keep their networks running and dragged me back in — and honestly, they loved me for it. Computers weren't done with me. Three years in real estate taught me how to sell, negotiate, and read a room. Every enterprise engagement since has used those skills.

1997. Unisys. Fly-and-fix field team. We rolled out the Y2K fix across the entire Social Security Administration. Visited nearly every state in the US — Thursday to Monday, week after week. One of the largest coordinated government IT deployments in history. I was on the ground for it.

2001. Tech bubble burst. Got laid off from iDirect post-9/11 — living the life one day, back in Richmond with nothing the next. That year hit hard on multiple fronts. Building something wasn't just about the money — it was about having something to show up for every day. Unemployment running out, no plan. So I downloaded pirated copies of Dreamweaver and Flash because I couldn't afford Adobe, and taught myself HTML, CSS, Java, and Flash from scratch. Built a portfolio. Landed VCU Art School, shops in Carytown, ecommerce clients. Started ProFilesPC — web, graphic design, security, and network consulting — six figures working from home. First thing I did when the money came in was buy a legal copy of the Adobe suite.

That's also where I first encountered automation. Dreamweaver added FTP — upload a site live without touching a terminal. A manual process, gone. That thought never left.

I've hardened the networks that move energy across continents, route the calls of hundreds of millions, and process the transactions of global finance. When critical infrastructure needs to be secured — gas & oil majors, telecom carriers, Fortune 500 enterprises — I'm the one they call.

In 2017 I joined Palo Alto Networks as one of the first two consultants on a team with no name, no desk, and no playbook. We were building something nobody had built before — what would eventually become Prisma Access, the product that defined modern SASE. I filed the Jira bugs, read the logs at 2am, stayed on the bridge when customers were yelling. Every one of those customers is still on Prisma Access today.

Now here we are with AI. Same moment. Same chaos. AIRS is evolving every week — agentic security, MCP protection, API Intercept. I couldn't get a demo so I reverse engineered the problem and built AISeal — a live AI Trust Certification platform — on personal time. Not a proof of concept. A deployed product. Because that's what I do.

I don't wait to be assigned. I build.

BadAshWednesdays — weekly deep dives on AI security, SASE architecture, and building at the edge of what's possible. No fluff. No theory. Just the work.