David Ashwell

Background

About David Ashwell

First and foremost I like to solve problems. Problems come in all shapes and sizes, and what I really enjoy is getting input from shareholders and solving tech problems that scale. From a pretty early age, I really liked Legos. A Lego kit would always give you a guide or best practice on what you could build with a particular set of blocks. After that first build, you could obviously get creative and build something new. One step further was combining multiple sets of Lego kits into something greater than the sum of the initial parts. This contraption, whatever it was that you built, was almost always unique, and yet was still constrained by the same mechanics of how Lego blocks fit together. Overtime, as Lego continued to make new pieces in different shapes and sizes, the possibilities expanded and the potential of what you could build became nearly endless. This, in my mind, is how the role of a Network Administrator, Architect, or DevOps Engineer works in today’s IT industry. Our blocks are the products and platforms developed to solve problems and are held together with common communication protocols. Combining these separate components (servers, switches, storage, hyper-converged platforms, operating systems, APIs, Cloud and Hybrid, etc.) with the different flavors of software to meet different business needs… well this sounds a lot like Legos. If I gave some eight year olds a bucket of Legos and asked them to build a spaceship each design will probably look like a spaceship, but each will be unique, despite having the same building blocks. Just like those eight year olds, every company has their own preferences on how to build out a platform. This is the IT world that I love to solve problems in.