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Hey, My name is Benjamin. You can call me Ben, or Benny. Professionally I’ve been doing system and solutions engineering. By Night, or with whatever spare time I can find, I climb down various tech rabbit holes.

A normal day of mine consists of both routines and spontaneity. I work out every day, eat a mostly meat diet and multitask work, music, podcasts, and news feeds. My favorite hobbies are travelling, hiking and on the rare ocassion inebriated dancing. I love to have a varied skillset, currently I'm leveling up my front end knowledge and experimenting with machine learning automation.

Early Life

I was that stereotypical geek kid who was very curious and eager to learn the inner workings of the video games that i've played. I'm always trying to see how something works or displayed and will go about learning those techniques to better my understanding of the world. Some of my early projects were various private servers and game addons for my friends and myself to enjoy. A lot of fond memories getting projects completed and seeing friends of mine enjoy what I had created.

College

I attended two different colleges, At Linn Tech I received my associates in computer programming and at SIU carbondale I studied information systems and network security. SIU Carbondale is where I had my first real job at the Daily Egyption. The DE was a great place to learn about deadlines, priorities and design. Many grueling hours and hardships but made tons of lasting memories. If it wasn’t for being a college part time gig, I would have loved to keep working there.

Career

After school I moved to Chicago and started my career in IT. I worked for two great companies where I learned a wide variety of systems in a support position. In 2016 I accepted a position with Stifel and ran several major projects starting with a windows 7 to 10 migration. I’m currently a System Engineer with Stifel working on all things Server and Workstation management. On a daily basis I'm performing vulnerability remediations, automating business workflows, packaging and deploying applications and imaging solutions. Current and Future projects are revolved around cloud computing and data analytics.

Motivation

I thrive in environments where there are opportunities to learn and grow. I’m always pushing for what is next, what challenges await me. I won’t always succeed but I learn from my failures and master from repetition. Knowledge also empowers me, I've always got an eye on the news of the day and the amazing research of tomorrow and beyond. I have great admiration for Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Lex Fridmun. I like to believe we share similar characteristcs in our passion for the work we do and the enthusiasim to help those n needi and share the knowledge we accumulate.

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