Many names

Offline and online, I have gone by many names.

Online, I’ve had many identities going back to 1985 as darkstar. At the moment, I’m primarily associated with the following:

Offline, I went by Garth, my first name, up until 2017 when I started using Troy, my middle name. I also respond to and create art as Dawn.

Recent Projects

I have recently been donating my resources to Autonomi, a decentralized storage solution I have been following since 2012.

  • ANT Faucet - A tool that dispenses network testing tokens to members of the autonomi community forum.
  • wnm - Weave Node Manager, an in-progress node management tool.
  • atr - Autonomi Transaction Reporter, A tool that will correlate the asset allocation of multiple crypto wallets, engaged in Autonomi transactions, on the live network.

History

I have had an extensive career, first working part time at a (family) factory and doing chores for neighbors as a child. When I started food service at 14, I got my first real exposure to customer service problems right away.

My first tech job was the summer of my first year in college, I rewrote the Point Of Sale and backoffice systems for a Fuel Station company in Long Beach and Aneheim. It got me hooked on solving problems with code.

I varied jobs over the next few years until I had an encounter with a team member on the Operations Team, complaining about how the engineers dropped code that needed to be run without consideration for the hardware requirements and lead times necessary to deploy the request. I took that information to heart and boldly thought, I bet I can learn better ways to deploy code in a few years and transitioned to Operations roles.

In 1995, I co-launched a Web Hosting business. I designed the tech stack and did consulting for companies that wanted to onboard to the Internet.

In 1998 I officially joined the startup world and a whirlwind of roles with companies who struggled to gain or maintain traction.

In 2010, I turned off the lights of the Web Hosting business to focus on decentralized projects (Weave).

In 2012, I launched the first Weave project, a node operator powered by Datafiniti. Sadly, Datafinity decommissioned the network in 2014 just as my next module, a browser extension called xdconsole that monitored the Datafinity workloads, was released.

Around this time, the way I had been treating engineering/operations with agile kinds of communication became formalized into a concept called DevOps. Over the next decade I ran a few large clusters, proving that infrastructure can be treated as code and run at scale.

Mostly, I just wanted this all to work, so now I’ve shifted my focus back on the Dev side of DevOps.