Paul Giberson - a tiny dot at the intersection of technology and eclecticism.
This is a brief summary of my experience with computers and work history.
I have always been a fan of technology. I can remember my family's first computer at 5 years old, an IBM PCjr. All I can recall with that computer is playing games that were inserted via cartridges.
As I got older I was exposed to more complex games that my Grandpa would play. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, Might and Magic, Silent Service, Eye of the Beholder, and many many more.
Growing up, my friends and I played computer games all the time. One of our favorites was EverQuest, and online MMORPG. I spent a year after graduating jobless, playing a lot of EQ. After starting a full-time job I realized I did not have much time to play the game, and felt lost with what to do with the game. I soon discovered an online marketplace where I could sell accounts and in-game items for real money. Unfortunately with every sale the auction site needed a cut, so I needed a way to keep all of the money. Exploring this idea, I learned basic HTML and listed items for sale with PayPal links on my free ISP shared hosting. From that point on I was enamoured with the web and web development.
Fast forward a few months I was attending Mesa Community College and started working on my Associate's degree in web development. After graduating, I did not see the industry for web development so when I transferred to Arizona State University I decided to work on my Bachelor's in Computer System Administration. (To be fair, in 2005 ASU didn't have a web development track, it looks like they do now in 2025.)
After graduating ASU I started as a system administrator at Socious (2008), an online community platform. I was initially responsible for migrating from colocated servers to this new thing called The Cloud. We first went to a company called ServePath and then quickly had to pivot to Slicehost. Some point in the future Slicehost was aquired by Rackspace and we were there for many moons.
At Socious, I was quickly transitioned to a developer after I built a web UI on top of our servers for VCS management and a bunch of other automated tasks that were cumbersome to execute manually. I spent eight years at Socious growing with the company from 6 employees to over 50 when they were acquired by Higher Logic. I worked at Higher Logic for a year before realizing my desire to work in smaller companies where my work has a more direct impact.
My next gig definitely fit the bill of a smaller company. IRELO had about a total staff of 6 when I started. IRELO is a lead generation company. They match customers with service providers in different industry verticals. The technolgy is comprised on several APIs and front end websites. Of all my projects I worked on, recreating an entirely new infrastructure was by far my favorite. The team that I replaced had left a mess of remnants all over a decaying Rackspace infrastructure. Over the course of 18 months, I painstakingly cataloged everything that was running across multiple disparate servers and then determined what was actually in use and what could be turned off. I think I found over a dozen different git repos or projects there were not in our VCS repo and added all of them to ensure things could be restored down the line. After all the discovery I then migrated to an entirely new infrastrucure in AWS. This migration resulted in about 85% cost reduction by getting rid of duplicative services, unused services, and migrating some APIs to serverless.
To be continued...