Introduction: Who am I?

Hey everyone, my name is Alex Eade and I am a current student at Texas A&M University. I am pursuing a Bachelor's of Business Administration in Management Information Systems. I currently hold the CCNA and CompTIA Security+ certifications. I also currently work as the Systems Engineering Team Lead for the Texas Cyber Range, a program designed to help students gain valuable work experience in the I.T and Software Engineering field. We essentially are a private cloud hosting numerous classes and research programs for Texas A&M University. If you want to learn more, you can visit our website at https://txcr.tamu.edu.

My Interests and Future

I am primarily interested in the I.T. field with an emphasis on Networking, specifically Network Design and Security. I hope to work as a Network Engineer post-graduation and transition to a Network Architect role at a big enterprise eventually. I find it fascinating that these systems have such a profound impact in the business field. I am still finding where my full interest in I.T. lands so this could change in the future. After implementing and maintaining secure systems in both my home lab and work environment, I started developing an interest in the System Administration field. The more I use Linux, the more I realize it is kind of fun running and implementing various software packages to enhance current business operations.

My Background

I am currently 19 years old and I have spent a lot of my time tinkering with technology through the years. I started playing video games with my dad around 7 years old when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 came out. The following Christmas I got my Xbox 360 and the rest was history. I started off with the usual kid games like Minecraft and slowly moved up to playing Call of Duty mainly. Eventually, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 decided to release mod tools on the PC for custom maps. I loved Call of Duty zombies and watched a lot of Call of Duty: World at War custom zombies videos. That birthday, my dad got me my first PC capable enough of playing video games. The trick, however, was that I had to build it myself. I learned to build computers and have always had custom PC's since. I built a few of my friend's PC's and I loved working with the hardware. A couple of years later around 2018, I fully switched to my PC for video games and with that came a lot of experience around the Windows OS. I grew in interest for how things worked in the computer space. How did my computer reach the internet? What even is the internet? What do all of these different parameters mean in my network interface? I didn't have a specific interest at the time but I just absorbed any information I could find regarding the whole technology sphere. I was known as the tech guy around my friends. Later on, I would take a Computer Maintenance course in high school that prepared me for my CompTIA A+. I never got the certification due to some voucher issues with the teacher, however that class made me realize just how much I loved this field. My small high school ran out of local classes so I had to turn to the local community college. I took Fundamentals of Networking, Firewalls and Network Security, and IT Security. These classes mostly followed the CompTIA curriculum and is where I learned a lot of my basic networking/security knowledge. I started experimenting with hosting various things after I graduated high school. It started off with a simple Minecraft server for all of my friends to play on, and then I messed around with Microsoft Windows Server to get a feel for Active Directory. Once I started to use Virtual Machines, I began to experiment way more. I got an install of Ubuntu and started to mess around with the command line and Nginx. After learning how Port Forwarding and NAT works, I decided to open my Nginx website up to the public. Rookie me just wanted to see it worked even if I just used HTTP instead of HTTPS. After figuring that out and learning Nginx, I bought my domain name and spent many hours figuring out how to enable HTTPS through TLS with a certificate. After that, I let it sit for a couple months while I figure out college as a new freshman. In this summer of 2024, I decided to fully commit to it and have a server up 24/7. To do this, I bought a small used HP 800 G3 Corporate PC for around $80 on Ebay. I installed Proxmox on it and now we have this website and some other home lab activities. I started very young and I don't see my interest dying off soon. Moving forward, I hope to share my journey with everyone as I get into the field.