$ whoami
The human behind the terminal. No root access required.
About Me
Hey, I'm Igor. By day I juggle the roles of Network Engineer and System Engineer at Convey, a multi-platform notification company formerly known as Message Broadcast. By night I'm usually SSH'd into something I probably shouldn't be.
I'm a lifelong open-source junkie and the kind of person who spins up a new project just to see how it works. Hardware hacking and reverse engineering are my idea of a good weekend. Breaking things (carefully) has taught me as much as building them.
All work and no play would be boring, but luckily my work feels like play.
The paycheck is a nice bonus that keeps my family of four fed and Wi-Fi'd. When I'm not racked into a server room you'll find me behind a camera lens, under the hood of a car, or figuring out how something really works.
Fun Facts
- Mass of caffeine consumed: ~1 metric ton
- 3 AM reboots survived: too many
- Printers fixed: 0. They fix themselves or they don't
- Favorite protocol: BGP (it has path selection)
English
Russian
There are only two hard problems in IT: DNS, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
My longest stint and current home base. I wear the Network Engineer and System Engineer hats simultaneously, sometimes at the same time, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Convey is a multi-platform notification company handling SMS, MMS, RCS, voice, email, push, and social channels. There's never a dull sprint, and the architecture keeps me honest.
After welcoming baby number two, I eased back into the field at a WBENC-certified litigation firm with offices across the western United States. Turns out attorneys generate almost as many tickets as printers. I kept systems secure and reliable across multiple practice areas while learning that "urgent" means something different in legal.
Providing IT services, cloud solutions, web hosting, and consulting for small-to-medium businesses across Southern California. Every client had different needs, different budgets, and different opinions about backups. The company has since evolved into SynoForce, and my time there gave me the broadest possible crash course in wearing every hat at once.
A sysadmin role supporting a retirement planning and advisory firm focused on educators and the public sector in California. Highly regulated environment where uptime and data integrity weren't optional. One of many gigs before this one (too many to list), but this is where the resume starts making sense. It taught me that the best infrastructure is the kind nobody notices, because it just works.
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Scope & Scale
Multi-site networks, hybrid cloud, and high-volume messaging platforms. If it routes, switches, or firewalls, I've probably touched it.
code
Automation
Python, Bash, PowerShell, Git. If I do it twice, I script it. If I script it twice, I template it. Infra as code or bust.
security
Security
Segmentation, VPN, IDS/IPS, hardening, key management, least privilege, and yes, compliance (PCI, HIPAA). The fun kind of paranoia.
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Reliability
Monitoring, alerting, SLOs, postmortems, capacity planning. My goal: make the pager stay quiet. It doesn't always cooperate.
Core Stack
Linux & Windows, VMware & KVM, AWS & Azure, containers, Nginx, HAProxy, MySQL, MS SQL, AD, LDAP, DNS, DHCP. Yes, I know, it's a lot.
How I Work
Document as I go, design before deploy, test in lab, automate what repeats, measure results, and leave things simpler than I found them. The Boy Scout rule, but for infrastructure.
The Lab Rat
Open source tinkerer, hardware hacker, reverse engineering enthusiast. If it has a circuit board and an undocumented API, I'm interested.
TCP/UDP, IPv4/IPv6, VLAN, BGP, OSPF, VPN, NAT, QoS, Wi-Fi
Firewalls, IDS/IPS, TLS, MFA, PAM, hardening, vulnerability management
Authoritative/recursive DNS, DNSSEC awareness, DHCP design and reservations
Linux, Windows Server, AD, Group Policy, virtualization (VMware, KVM)
Python, Bash, PowerShell, Git, CI builds, templating, REST APIs
AWS, Azure, load balancers, IAM basics, monitoring and logging
Want to Talk Shop?
Whether you have a project, a question, or just want to argue about tabs vs. spaces.