Outlan

About

I started in 1991 at Regeneron, in biotech, building thin-coax ARCnet and Ethernet LANs, running Netware, and setting up dial-up TCP/IP internet access — along with the direct internet connections, internet mail, and the LAN, WAN, and user systems that came with it. The unglamorous plumbing everything else depends on. The timing turned out to be a stroke of luck more than a plan, because it put me right at the start of the modern internet. Firewalls when they were still a new idea. The U.S. Internet backbone taking shape. At Advanced Networks and Services, which helped run that early backbone and built AOL's dial-up network, I got to be part of the dawn of commercial web hosting — I ended up supporting the hosting for McGraw-Hill's entire magazine catalog at one point, which felt like a big deal at the time and, in hindsight, mostly taught me how much I still had to learn. Later, at Edgix, I did early content delivery, caching, and acceleration work, back when all of it was still being invented as we went, not bought off a shelf.

From there the path wandered a bit — a handful of local and regional ISPs, a stretch in consumer electronics at Philips. Along the way I picked up systems and storage alongside networking and security, on real hardware and real operating systems — AIX, Solaris, Linux, BSDI, even Apple's UNIX before OS X existed. I'm told that makes me "full-stack" now. I just thought of it as doing the job.

In 2001, in the wake of the dot-bomb, after the latest startup went bust, I landed a job at McKinsey & Company — I had no idea at all what they actually did. I started out on the internal side, supporting the Firm itself, and — like a lot of technologists there — ended up, 24 years later, supporting both the Firm and its clients, mostly educating the uninitiated in the net-sec arts: that zero trust is not a product, that identity is genderless, and that if you can't see it or measure it, you really can't secure it. Hope is not a strategy. And just because you can doesn't mean you should. My approach never really changed the whole time: if my mother could understand what I was proposing, my clients probably could too. These days I work in network security engineering and help out a few technology companies as an advisor.

I'm grateful for all of it. It's a strange career to sum up in a bio, and I'm not sure I've fully managed it here — but it's the reason I have opinions worth reading, and why I started writing them down.

Book & Writing

I wrote Understanding the Network: A Practical Guide to Internetworking (New Riders, 2000) mostly because nobody else seemed to actually understand networking well enough to explain it — most books at the time were either textbooks or training manuals. I also wrote a handful of articles for SearchNetworking.com, which I'm fairly sure are still floating around out there somewhere, and did a few podcasts on security, SD-WAN, and automation along the way.

Papers

Longer-form technical papers, with citations, on network and network security architecture. Browse the Papers →

Contact

For inquiries: netman0u812@outlan.net

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are mine, and mine alone. They do not reflect the views or positions of any company or organization I am, or have been, associated with in any way. I am solely responsible for any errors or inaccuracies in this work.