Where I’m headed

I’m building a career in technical support and managed WordPress hosting support — the kind of work where someone is stuck, often frustrated, and needs the problem understood and solved. My target is a Support Engineer role at a managed WordPress host, with a long-term path toward solutions architecture. I care about the open web, about democratized publishing, and about treating the person on the other end of a problem with patience, whether they’re technical or not.

Helping people get unstuck is something I already do constantly, paid or not — through my work and through community groups like UIC Linux Users Group. and ACM@UIC. This site is where I do it in the open.

What this blog is about

Every post follows the same diagnostic spine — the way I actually work:

• Symptom — what went wrong, as experienced
• Root Cause — what was actually wrong, not just what looked wrong
• Fix — what I did, step by step
• Why It Matters — the stakes, and who it affects
• Lesson — the generalizable takeaway, so the next case goes faster

The cases range across the whole stack, on purpose. A code-level bug debugged and shipped with a public GitHub trail; a WordPress.com setup gotcha that hid a whole blog from its readers; a “the internet is down” call that turned out to be a heavy box crushing an Ethernet cable. Different layers, same method.

Resume: or A bit of experience

I’ve worn the support hat in a lot of forms:

• Technology coordinator and primary tech support for a 200+ person school community
• Designated technical contact for specific platforms and installs
• Freelance in-person and phone technical support
• Traveling Java instructor
• Latin and ballroom dance teacher
• TA for math, CS, occasional instructor
• So: years of making hard things land for real people
• Open-source contributor (including a fix to the Plato project on GitHub), currently building in a WordPress dev environment

Want the full picture? Contact me for my complete resume.