Beyond the basics of my professional career (as outlined on LinkedIn), I have always believed that success in IT requires more time than the hours on the job between 9-5. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with everything that is critical to one's ability to excel in IT if you're only spending the hours from 9AM until 5PM attempting to do so. I've spent countless hours in SharePoint user group meetings, SharePoint Saturdays, and numerous conferences -- and in some cases, I've paid out of my own pocket to attend conferences.

My home lab includes several Dell servers (running both VMware ESXi 6.5 and Hyper-V) hosting my dev/test SharePoint farms. I believe that successfully managing SharePoint farms requires a solid hands-on understanding of both the Windows Server OS and Hyper-V/VMware virtualization environments. My home lab enables me to do so more completely than I can 'in the office'.

In my free time, I like to spend time with my wife and our dogs, Milo and Tazzie. I'm a 'hands-on' kind of guy, more inclined to build/fix things on my own, rather than pay somebody else to do it; as a result, our home and large yard take up a fair amount of my time. Staying healthy is a priority, so I work out at our local YMCA several times a week. I enjoy traveling, and while I prefer the mountains (preferably the Sierra around Yosemite or the Tetons), my wife is more of a beach girl, so our next anniversary destination will likely be Hawaii. We also enjoy spending time with our nieces and nephews and their (growing) families!