Hi! I’m Matt Petty, a network engineer in Knoxville, TN, with over 15 years of experience in healthcare IT.

My IT career started with help desk and desktop support, but quickly shifted to network engineering, and for the last 10+ years, has focused mainly on network security and services. My primary experience is in the Cisco ecosystem, particulary the Cisco ASA and Sourcefire Firepower Secure Firewall, and many other Cisco acronym soups (AnyConnect, ISE, IOS, NX-OS, WLC, even a little DNA and ACI).

I’ve also had some experience with Infoblox DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) products, as well as various products from Forcepoint/Websense, SonicWall, Barracuda, and more.

I hold no official certifications other than a CompTIA A+ from 2004, though I did obtain two degrees from a now-defunct educational “institute”. Despite the lack of official credentials, I still love learning about, labbing, and documenting any technology that draws my curiosity.

I’m also something of an Apple fanboy, a general Linux hobbyist, interested in open source software, and a longtime “small computing” enthusiast (such as the ASUS Eee PC; Marvell Sheevaplug; Raspberry Pi; 1L computing; Ubiquiti ER-X; MikroTik mAP lite; to name just a few…)

Up until I discovered the concepts of DevOps and infrastructure-as-code, my coding journey had always been a side hobby, tinkering with Perl, PHP, HTML, Javascript, and SQL over the years, but for the last few years I’ve been attempting to deeply learn Python, network automation, and modern infrastructure tooling to take my network engineering skills to the next level. Now, I’m finally ready to start documenting the journey here on this blog.

Thanks for visiting!