Welcome!

Hi. I'm Stephen, thanks for visiting my digital home. On this site, I hope to share my thoughts on all the things I am passionate about: software, technology, IT security, AI, and electronics. Here you'll be able to learn more about me by reading my thoughts on the blog, viewing my projects in the project section, or viewing my resume. If all of those things inspire you to want to know more about me, you can always contact me via the contact link in the navigation bar, or connect with me on one of the social media outlets listed on the front page. Whatever your reason for visiting, I hope you find something useful or interesting here.

Who am I?

I am a software engineer currently working as a senior developer support engineer at Salesforce. Prior to working for Salesforce directly, I was a Salesforce developer / admin for about two years. Prior to that, I spent 5 years as a NetSuite developer and administrator at various end users, and did some NetSuite consulting for a while.

I live in the DFW Metroplex with my wife Erica, and our two cats, Roxanne and Charlie.

In my free time, I enjoy reading, chess, learning foreign languages, playing video games, and playing piano.

My history with technology

The early years

I got my first computer around 1995, at the age of about six. It was an old hand-me-down from an uncle. I don't even recall what brand or any specs. I just remember that there was no user interface, so it probably ran some version of DOS. I was too young to really understand how to work the system and no one in my immediate family really had any skills with technology. So, I only knew how to run a few commands to launch some games, like wheel of fortune and solitaire. I don't even remember what happened to that computer, but at that time, I wasn't too interested.

Fast forward to around 1998-1999, I started getting back into computers again when staying at another Uncle's house. I was a video game kid, so I mostly played games on his computer. In the year 2000, I got my first computer, a compaq presario running windows 98. We didn't have internet, so I mostly used it for gaming and things I couldn't play on console, like Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Civilization, and The Sims

The fun begins

In 2003, at the age of 14, we got internet for the first time. Slow dialup from Walmart's now defunct ISP, Walmart Connect. It wasn't even a full 56k connection. I upgraded my Compaq Presario and got a new, Y2K safe (haha) eMachines, running Windows XP. The internet, and connectivity in general, greatly heightened my appetite to learn more about technology. I was into fantasy novels, especially Harry Potter, so I stumbled onto my first IRC server on the MuggleNet (a Harry Potter fansite) website.

On IRC, I started making friends my age from all over the world. At first, I was connecting through the java applet on the Mugglenet website, until some long-time members told me about the IRC desktop client mIRC. I downloaded that and started spending more time on IRC. Mugglenet Chat had an online quidditch league that was text-based and relied on mIRC scripts to work. Through my involvement with that, I learned my first scripting language, the mIRC Scripting Language. MySpace, LiveJournal, and Xanga also got me interested in web technologies due to the use of HTML and CSS.

I made a bunch of IRC bots and scripts and was immediately hooked. My friends and I, spending so much time on MuggleNet IRC, really wanted to become moderators. Every time we applied, we were not chosen. Looking back on it now, it's immediately obvious why: we were just kids. The MuggleNet staff were all in college, or even working adults. There was just no way that a group of 14-15 year olds would be permitted to moderate a fairly large IRC server. The MuggleNet IRC community at that time was very large. There were thousands of users. JK Rowling even came there once to do an ask-me-anything style interview before ask-me-anything was even a thing.

Spurned by MuggleNet, my friends and I decided we'd just create our own website and IRC server, WizardNet. We thought we were clever. In the Harry potter world, Muggles are ordinary, non-magic people. Wizards were their opposite. Why be a muggle when you could be a wizard. People would definitely come to our site. definitely.

There's just one problem: I didn't know how to make a website, and had even less of a clue on how to set up, configure, and run an IRC server. But, I had the internet, so it was time to learn! I figured out that MuggleNet's IRCd at that time was called UnrealIRCd, so I started figuring out how to make that run. The software wasn't really meant to be run on a home computer running windows, so all of the instructions basically assumed you'd be running things from a linux server. I was 15 and really didn't have the money for a VPS back then. They were more expensive then. These days, I can spin up any number of VMs on any number of cloud providers and, as long as I stay within their free tier limits, I don't pay a dime. That would have been awesome in 2004.

So, my next best plan was to simply install Linux as my OS, and run the IRC server and website from my home, and just never turn the computer off. It rarely was turned off anyway. By this time, we had ditched Walmart Connect and subscribed to Comcast's broadband, so I thought I'd be good to go. I chose Ubuntu. It was fairly new at that time and was supposed to be a friendlier introduction to linux. They were so tiny back then that one of the legitimate ways of acquiring ubuntu, if you didn't have the bandwidth to download it, was to request that a volunteer from somewhere in the world physically mail you a copy. Nowadays, Ubuntu is everywhere. I wonder if I can still get a mailed copy?

Anyway, despite the praises sung for Ubuntu and it being a more approachable version of linux, let me just go ahead and say that using ubuntu as a desktop in 2004 was not at ALL user friendly. I spent many countless hours on the forums and in IRC just trying to make all of my hardware work correctly. In the end, I was victorious.

With Ubuntu freshly installed, I installed IRCd and an apache webserver and began to self host WizardNet's IRC and web servers. I didn't really secure anything, and didn't really have any concept of network or system security, so I'm pretty sure it was open season on my computer. But I wasn't worried. When I used windows, you basically got viruses just by looking at a popup the wrong way. Plus, people said there were no viruses on linux, so it wasn't really necessary, right?

Once we had our IRC up and running, we decided we wanted to fully customize it so we could do cool things like add new channel modes for different Hogwarts houses and customize the server to make it more Harry Potter-like. I started trying to learn C to hack together some Harry Potter friendly unrealIRCd modules. I managed to even get a few to work, but definitely didn't go all that deeply. Still, I loved it! It felt great to know that I had created something from nothing.

In the end, as high school came to a close and our quest to overtake Mugglenet had failed (I think we maybe had like max ten concurrent users at peak), I spent less time on IRC and eventually stopped really working with code and Linux.

I took my time in college, first starting at a community college where I took core classes for a few years, and then transferring to a state university, where I studied modern languages (French and Spanish). I continued reading about and keeping up-to-date with technology, but I wasn't building anything. I took some C classes as electives in college, but mostly didn't do much with software at this time.

Current day

I left my modern language bachelors program in my senior year. It was 2015 and I was coming off a year of living in France as a teaching assistant in the north of the country. Being in France made me realize two things: I wasn't cut out to be a teacher, and I missed technology. I had spent the last seven years of my life working toward a bachelor's degree in modern languages without really knowing what I wanted to do with it when I finished. I regretted not studying computer science. It was something I loved. It would've given me better skills to be job ready.

When I got back from France, I took a bilingual French-English customer service representative job. This was the final nail in the coffin. I knew I had made a mistake. I started looking for ways to start over and earn my bachelor's in computer science. I found Western Governors University and saw that they had an online program. There was no computer science program at that point, just software development. Still, that was close enough. I enrolled and eventually completed my bachelor's degree from there in 2017. I started working as a developer atr an end user of the popular mid-market SAAS ERP application NetSuite. I earned my MBA in IT management from WGU in 2019. For the next four years, I worked as a NetSuite Developer and NetSuite administrator. In 2022, inspired by some heavy Salesforce work I did at my previous company, I decided to switch platforms and worked as a Salesforce administrator and developer at a Salesforce end-user.

Today, I am a senior developer support engineer at Salesforce. I'm doing a master's degree in computer science from the University of Colorado-Bolder. My learning journey continues and I love being constantly inundated with new technical challenges. I hope I can share some of that passion with you here.