I write this blog post with a bit of a heavy heart, as this is going to be a significant change for me. Friday, February 6th, 2015 is going to be my last day working full-time at APX Labs as an Associate Systems Engineer. After thinking about where I am, what I want to do, and how I might want to get there, I have decided that it is time to move on to a new position. After leaving APX, I will be starting work as a System Engineer at Berico Technologies here in Reston, VA.
I started working at APX in December of 2012. I had just graduated from RIT two quarters early, and was excited about coming back into the NOVA area in order to be a) working full-time at a "real" job - not just an internship - and b) back around family and friends. Originally working on an engineering contract that we had for the DoD, I eventually transitioned over to handle all internal IT services for the company and juggled half a dozen other items that really didn't fit with any one role.
Over the two-plus years that I have been at APX I have met and worked with a number of incredibly-talented engineers who have immense amounts of knowledge relating to what they do and are motivated to explore technology to further our collective knowledge. We have worked stressful, long hours, and played just as hard. Many friendships have been created and hopefully will be sustained long into the future. It has been a privilege working around such individuals and I hope that some of their enthusiasm and drive has rubbed off on me and will help me in the future as I progress through life. I hope to keep in touch with everyone as I am neither moving out of the area nor straying from technology as my day job.
The transition from one position to the next will be a significant change for me, but hopefully career-wise it will be for the best. I will be moving from general IT support for APX to doing Linux systems engineering for Berico. This work, focused around both company infrastructure and some contracts, should allow me to be able to experiment and develop my automation and virtualization skills by working with new techologies on the market and applying those to real situations. Whether I am able to utilize anything from oVirt to OpenStack or Ansible to Chef, I hope I will be able to learn and develop higher-level administration/engineering ideas that I will be able to leverage later on and throughout my career.
While transitioning from one thing to another is always hard, the future looks bright. A new opportunity awaits me to do work for others and to better myself holistically. I have nothing but the utmost respect for everyone at APX, and I wish them and the company all the best wishes for future endeavors. Much work has been done, but there is even more still left to do!
Onward and upwards,
Stephen
