Jerod Piatt

I've spent my entire life including career solving various technical issues.

My first technical job at Volt covered iOS tier 1, Mac Tier 1, and then iOS tier 2 as a contractor on the Applecare line.

Moving over to Rackspace got me trained for the MCSA 365 within the first 2 weeks of hire and had me support fairly general technical issues from the lens of Email. There was also heavy exposure to Microsoft 365 as a platform including migrations, hybrid on-prem/365 setups utilizing connectors(generally in a migration context), 365 security features and device management in Entra and Intune, etc.

We also covered how to properly manage email reputation with a particular emphasis on how to use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and the importance of Bulk SMTP providers such as Mailgun, MailChimp, SendGrid, etc. I went a little further and actually read the RFCs because features such as enabling DKIM strict alignment requirements can make it easier to set up a DMARC of p=reject for mail with multiple platform sources without needing to worry as much about overly permissive SPF policies or unexpected blocking of sent mail so long as all expected sources of mail for your given domain are known.

Once I was a Lead Email Technician I was also much heavier on offering formal feedback, updating documentation, maintaining our delegate administrator connection scripts for Microsoft 365 and install guides for the script due to updates to their powershell modules, floor training, keeping documentation up to date, handling Premiers such as, most commonly, Tenant has exceeded threshold, and relevant remediations of compromised users or inappropriate use of the platform. There was also more backend interaction with our on-prem Hosted Exchange servers and more clarity into what was happening in Linux Ops for Rackspace Email. I was also writing public incident updates on our Status Page.

After that, I went through our Technical Onboarding Program, was trained on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, obtaining the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer and AZ-104 certs as well as a Terraform Associate cert. The actual day to day ended up being Azure, but onboarding sadly never really finished because we had some funnel issues and I was understandably laid off when there wasn't enough work to go around.

At CyberFortress I got to enjoy being exposed to a wide variety of backup products including Veeam, however a lot of the troubleshooting skill isn't quite as transferrable due to the specificity of the applications. Still, it's nice to have a greater appreciation for the scoping and usage of backups and to have had the opportunity to rewrite the documentation standards for support so that when the documentation consolidation effort finishes there will be a unified standard to use to rework existing documentation.

As far as pure personal interest goes I've been running Linux on and off since middle school. For entertainment I had a t440p which had Gentoo set up, but due to usability issues related to the slow Haswell 4712mq I ended up moving over to Alpine which was great. My main gaming machine has been running Linux since before we had dxvk which has resulted in lots of fairly entertaining troubleshooting of seemingly random instabilities as Linux gaming has matured over time. When we still had the team, I was also running my Team Fortress 2 team's practice server. I have an M1 Macbook Pro I ended up installing Asahi Linux on and generally I've just ad-hoc helped people with wide varieties of general technical issues online such as installing Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC with a Local User Account rather than a Microsoft Account and how to safely strip down Windows without causing undue functionality and security damage, modding various games, how to configure tiling window managers, how to make a script to do sensitivity randomization with libinput on Wayland, etc. just for fun. I've also used VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, and QEMU for virtualization at various times. For what I was doing, I ended up getting a VMware Workstation license. If I was planning PCIe Passthrough I'd have just used QEMU/kvm, but I was mostly using apps which are fine with relatively lower graphical performance caused by the virtualized graphics card being inferior at both standards compatibility and actual performance.

I maintain a full DMARC setup to p=reject for my personal domain's email. It's just the right thing to do.

I essentially haven't run into a technology that given a reasonable use case I couldn't see myself adopting and enjoying. While I'm relatively weaker at coding(mostly maintaining scripts), my general troubleshooting chops are more than present, and I keep up with computer hardware, performance, efficiency, and even some forms of peripheral out of simple interest.