It Wasn’t Easy, But It Was Worth It
Intro
From the streets of the Philippines to enterprise systems in the United States, my IT journey has been shaped by work, faith, and persistence.
If you are starting from nothing, keep going — progress often begins long before anyone notices.
Early Grit
At twelve years old, I helped support my family by selling newspapers at midnight, shining shoes, washing dishes, and doing whatever work I could find. I didn’t know what IT was back then. I just knew how to work.
From Survival to Skill
When I immigrated to the U.S. in 1990, survival came first. I worked warehouse jobs, midnight shifts, and eventually landed a customer service role at All Electronics.
This photo was taken during that time.
From 6:30 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, I answered calls nonstop — sometimes hundreds in a day. Getting to work meant taking multiple buses across the city. After my shift ended, I took another bus to my second job — either working the drive-through at Taco Bell or selling auto parts at O’Reilly in Reseda.
It was exhausting. But those years built my endurance.
That computer behind me was just part of my job then. I didn’t know it yet, but it would become the doorway to my future.
Later, I bought my own computer and started learning the only way I knew how — by breaking it and fixing it over and over again. Windows 3.0, autoexec.bat, and config.sys became my teachers. Night after night, I stayed with problems until they made sense.
Breakthrough
No one wanted to hire me without experience, so I created my own. I fixed computers for neighbors and small businesses for free. That’s how I learned.
In the early days of IT, skills were learned the hard way. There were no structured learning paths — just curiosity, manuals, broken machines, and persistence.
Eventually, USC took a chance on me — and I made sure I was ready. I supported hundreds of users, worked on migrations, and found my place in IT.
From USC, new doors opened quickly. I was recruited by GTE — now known as Verizon — and not long after, an aerospace company in Carson offered me a six-figure role. It was a moment that reminded me how far persistence can take you.
But in 2003, I made a decision that shaped the rest of my career. I left corporate America and built my own IT consulting company.
The City of West Covina became one of my first major clients — along with firefighters and the police department. USC later brought me back as a senior consultant. Opportunities followed: Microsoft projects, the Claremont Colleges, law firms, American Samoa, and Fortune 500 environments.
Over time, I expanded the business by hiring developers, engineers, and support staff — building not just systems, but people.
Back to Corporate America
The 2008 recession changed everything. It was a time when, as they say, big fish eat small fish. Consulting work slowed, and I knew it was time to pivot again.
My first step back into corporate America was Payforward, a startup company where I helped migrate infrastructure to Amazon Web Services during the early days of cloud adoption. Working in a startup environment sharpened my ability to move fast, solve problems with limited resources, and adapt quickly.
From there, I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a Support Email Engineer — a worldwide organization operating at global scale. It was there that my PowerShell scripting became more refined and reliable. We supported enterprise messaging systems while the organization expanded into Azure and AWS, strengthening both my automation skills and my understanding of cloud infrastructure.
After that, I moved into the financial sector at City National Bank. That environment introduced me to enterprise-grade infrastructure and security architecture — multiple datacenters, blade server systems, layered “brick-by-brick” firewall protection, application performance monitoring (APM), and the operational discipline required to keep banking systems secure and resilient. It was where infrastructure stopped being just systems and became architecture.
Later, I joined PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company), one of the most demanding global environments I had experienced. Technologies like Citrix VDI, AWS, Azure, and enterprise security platforms such as Duo, CyberArk, Arctic Wolf, Palo Alto, and SIEM monitoring were part of daily operations. Mailboxes could reach sizes close to 1 TB, and migrations happened across global regions — North America (NA), Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific (APAC).
Like Payforward, these environments required regular PCI-DSS and HITRUST audits. My PowerShell automation matured even further, and I learned how to operate inside highly regulated financial systems where security, compliance, and reliability were non-negotiable.
These experiences prepared me for the infrastructure work I continue to do today.
Where I Am Today
Today I work as an Infrastructure Engineer in Utah. I automate with PowerShell, document systems, support enterprise infrastructure, and mentor others who are starting their own IT journeys.
My work now includes provisioning ERP computers into Intune, managing VMware environments, and maintaining a Cisco Meraki network with a 10GB fiber backbone across MDM and multiple IDF locations. I also support Cisco UCS, Fibre Channel connectivity, Veeam backups, end-of-life transitions, Microsoft Defender, and Azure infrastructure.
Looking back, nothing about this path was easy. But every long bus ride, every second job, and every broken computer taught me something I still use today.
I didn’t fall into IT. I worked my way into it.
Everything I document today in my technical notes traces back to those early days of learning by doing.
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