You have reached the home of Mark J Wicker, head computer nerd.

I’m an OCD nerd who loves NASCAR, fast cars, guitars, cooking, airplanes and gardening, heck, I even played baseball and was a varsity pitcher for my High School back in the day. I have been a Dodger fan since I was a kid. I saw Kirk Gibson hit that miraculous home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series and went absolutely nuts! I’m what you would call a new type of Renaissance man… without the manscaping.

My daughter and wife are my family and we have a happy life here in the Inland Empire.

I am a walking contradiction. I am a computer nerd who also owns and works on a 1970 Mustang Mach I. I appreciate new technology but I have more admiration for the old. I am a Christian who likes good beer and good scotch. I occasionally smoke a cigarette. I am a conservative with many liberal friends. I have been judgmental and also been judged. I am a perfectionist who is far from perfect. I am human. I love God. I am, no different from you. We all try so hard to identify and pigeonhole ourselves. Don’t. We are all unique individuals born from God who are here to live His purpose. I would hope that we could all be honest with ourselves most of the time…even though I am not all the time. We are human. I am human.

I have been working in the IT field since 1995, but as a young boy, my first foray into the world of computers began with my Commodore VIC-20. Boy, did it go! (lol)

Here is my professional “about me”-

Experienced IT Leader and Senior Network Engineer with ~30 years in the business –

I believe that the future of the networking business is in automation. Some people now call this “SDN” or “Software Defined Networking”. I have been doing this for the last 3+ years with my scripts to automate multi VRF “cloud” tenant builds in Data Center environments. Back in the beginning of it, there was no such buzz-acronym as “SDN”. My version of “SDN” was writing IP aware “here document” scripts with logic tied inputs to generate and automate the correct configurations of entire network environments so that they could easily be deployed (error free) in minutes instead of hours. When tied with the API’s of various IPAM and DNS solutions, these scripts became fully automated home grown “SDN” solutions.

Because of my unique Unix/Linux system admin background where I learned how to script and automate common, repeatable tasks combined with many more years as a Cisco Senior Network Engineer and as a Leader of a global network engineering team. – I believe that I am on the forefront of what it means to be called a Senior Network Engineer in this day and age. I adhere to this same rule under which I have mentored all of my teams under – “Network Engineering, in this day and age and in the future, means that you need to be a developer/coder first who has an in depth understanding of networking protocols, standards and architecture”.

Specialties: Cisco CCIE candidate for R&S and Security
IBM pSeries/AIX 5.3 Certified Engineer
Sun Solaris 8,9,10 administrator
Certified Novell Engineer