👋🏻 I’m Patrick Cable. I created Big Technology LLC to provide an official home for the consulting work I occasionally do. Also, I thought the name was especially funny for a single-person entity.
You can read a bit more about me and what I do on my about page. In short, I have been computer-ing and helping people understand how technology works for just about my entire life. Technology is interesting to me because there are so many different ways to accomplish any particular task. This freedom is great conceptually, but it is daunting if you’re just trying to get something done safely. I’m a big believer that technology needs to serve the people or organizations that use it, and I strive to make it as approachable and friendly as possible.
Offerings
I put the types of work I can help you with into two categories: technology advice, and systems design/analysis/implementation. I don’t specifically call out security in any of these because I believe that’s a key part of any deliverable I’d provide, and would work with you to understand what that means for you or your organization.
Technology Advice
You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers, backed by many years of experience. Depending on what you need help with, I may be able to help integrate it, debug it, etc. These tend to be a few hours of work total.
I work best when I have enough context to understand the why of a question and what you’re looking to achieve, as opposed to just the question itself. Generally, the kind of things I’ve helped with look like:
- “Given a set of unique constraints, how would I approach implementing a technology?”
- “You’ve worked with X technology before, have you ever got it to do Y? If so, how?”
- “I don’t know why X doesn’t work given this application infrastructure”
- “Whoa, I’m concerned about [some sort of confidentiality, integrity, or availability threat] - can you help me figure out what I need to do to not have that threat?”
- “Wait, X and Y technologies can talk to each other? Could you write an integration of some sort to do that for us?”
- “I’m curious about your thoughts on this company or pitch?”
- Generally, this is because an investor is interested in funding it, as opposed to detailed due diligence activities.
- “How can I reach people like you with a product I’m building?”
Systems Design, Analysis, and Implementation
I’ve done a lot of work around managing technology needs for a variety of organizations. These projects tend to be a little bit bigger in scope and often require ongoing maintenance. Truthfully, I can’t commit to projects like this at this time.
Some of the things I’ve done include:
- Managing IT for a small town in Massachusetts. I was brought in after an IT employee left and there was a couple of months to spend ~$50,000 to modernize some IT needs within town hall and other municipal buildings. For the following six years I would perform a variety of other tasks - from helping folks use their desktops, to designing wide area networks, to managing vendors - all kinds of things. I occasionally did some similar work for the school district
- For many years I’ve helped one of the first fully remote tax preparation firms ensure they can store and access client returns safely from anywhere. In 2009 this was a physical server in an apartment with a VPN. In 2016 I moved them to AWS, modernized their VPN setup to require hardware tokens with PKI, manage server updates and more. I regularly provide basic security training at the beginning of the season, help get new employees set up with their laptops, and help them when something goes wrong. I also handle data backup and restores as necessary, and pretty much everything else too.
- Managing processes can be a pain without good tooling. I’ve built small-scale web applications to help facilitate requesting new additions to a central parts database or tools to help administrators manage LDAP.
- Getting people to use security tooling can be a challenge. Some of the tools I’ve written and open-sourced can help drive up adoption or make challenging tasks easier.
Specific Skills, Technologies, etc.
As far as actual technologies I’m pretty comfortable with:
- Operating Systems: I have an advanced understanding of Linux internals, and a decent understanding of macOS internals. I’m comfortable with Windows and know enough about it to manage some desktops.
- Server side: I am very comfortable managing a bunch of Linux servers. I’m pretty comfortable with Chef (well, now Cinc) for configuration management. Any of them are fine, though. I’ve done large Terraform implementations, and I’ve dipped my toes into the Kubernetes world.
- I have a lot of OpenLDAP experience.
- I generally reach for Go or Ruby when I need to write code.
- I’ve used Sinatra and Rails to make some very small-scale web applications.
- My cloud of choice is AWS: I’m very familiar with how it works, IAM – it’s all super natural to me. I’ve used GCP and Azure, but I’m a little less confident with best practices in those clouds.
- I don’t do a lot of hardware networking these days, but I have some Meraki, Ubiquiti and SonicWall experience. I’ve deployed Cisco and Juniper devices before, too.
- If it’s not here, describe it and I’m happy to let you know if it’s something I feel good about.
Often times when I encounter something that’s hard to Google for I’ll dive in and try and figure out the “why behind the what.” Generally I post those deep dives on my blog. While many of these are technical in nature and intended for an engineering audience, I’m comfortable presenting my work to a variety of folks – executives, engineers, or end-users.
I’m Interested!
Exciting! One important thing to note: my day job keeps me sufficiently busy, so I’m not taking any kind of projects that could require my attention during business hours – or too many of my weekend hours, honestly. If your needs are smaller in scope (and most importantly don’t present a conflict of interest) perhaps we could work something out. There are a number of ways to contact me on my main page. I may need a day or two to respond to Big Technology inquiries. If there’s a fit we can discuss terms. If not, I may be able to refer you elsewhere.
Either way, you made it to the end of this page. Thanks for your interest in Big Technology.