A comfortable job, and more to offer
I’ve been building on the internet since 1998. GeoCities, blink tags, and a visitor counter I refreshed myself to look busy.
Systems that could not go down
I studied at ITCA in El Salvador and built my career in Canada. For fifteen years I worked in infrastructure, enterprise and government systems, the kind of work nobody notices until it fails.
In 2014 and 2015, at Toronto Hydro, I managed a multimillion-dollar datacenter migration from start to finish: VMware clusters, storage area networks and middleware.
From 2015 to 2017, at the Ontario Public Service, my work was mostly middleware deployments on UNIX. Both jobs included WebLogic and WebSphere. Along the way I became a VMware Certified Professional.
It was serious work, done for serious institutions. It paid well, and it was safe.
The paycheck that didn’t make sense
In 2016 I went deep on SEO. I started watching where the money actually comes from online: which click made the sale, and which channel was stealing the credit.
Then one day I was sitting in a government building, collecting a paycheck that didn’t make sense. They paid me a lot of money. Everything about the job was comfortable.
That was the problem.
“I felt like I had more to offer in this life than a comfortable job.”
I had to try working on my own terms. In February 2017, I started my own business in Mississauga.
I knew how to migrate a datacenter and keep middleware running. I did not yet know how to keep a small business alive online. It wasn’t easy.