Matt Goodrich

About Me

Personal

I graduated from college this year and have (I guess) finally become a fully functioning adult.

I live by myself in northern Colorado Springs. Most weekends you will probably find me somewhere in Colorado, but probably not in Colorado Springs. The summer is Jeeping and camping season, so best bet is you will find me somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The winter season is ski season, and the weekends I am not in the mountains I am probably at home working on some project (usually involving programming).

Having gone to college in the beer capital of the US, Fort Collins, I do love a good beer. Fort Collins has some of my favorite breweries including New Belgium, Odells, Fort Collins Brewery and the Equinox Brewery. I spent many afternoons sitting on the patio at these places enjoying their latest brews.

Technical Background

I first got into computers in the early years of middle school, around age 10 or 11. My first introduction into computing was building a computer (which was my christmas present that year). I knew a fair amount for my age about operating systems and how to fix things, and worked as a volunteer at my school building and fixing computers (I even got class credit).

Once I got into high school I immediatly got into the technology track. I started as a freshmen in the Oracle Internet Academy, a pilot program from Oracle that only a few schools in the country had. That year I was introduced to Data Modeling and SQL and at the end of the year I was ready to take the Oracle 9i certification exam. Normally this class has a pre-requisite of taking a year of programming, but I was let in anyway.

I was hooked at this point. Over the next 3 years of high school I took C++ Progamming I, C++ Programming II, AP Computer Science I, AP Computer Science II, Game Programming, Cisco Networking Academy I-IV (CCNA ready) as well as be a teaching assistant for several of these classes.

After graduating high school and being admitted to Colorado State University I ended up getting a Bachelors of Science in Applied Computing Technology (ACT). ACT was a program out of the Computer Science Department that integrates a core CS curriculum as well as a Core Business/Computer Information Systems curriculum.

I worked for the university throgh my entire degree program there. I initially started as a help desk intern for a department on campus in charge of building and fixing machines for about 60 users as well as a bit of windows domain and server administration. I was eventually tasked with creating a small web application to store our inventory to get away from the horrible Microsoft Access file we were keeping. This department also included the universities central web gurus, so I was in good hands when I had questions. I ended up building that first app in classic ASP, but immediately ported it to .NET 2.0 after I realized that I was behind the times.

After I started using .NET I couldn't stop. Apparently I was doing something right, the head of the web group re-tasked me as a part time web developer. I was in charge of re-doing a university website for the public relations group on campus, http://news.colostate.edu. Overall this project took over a year from beginning to end, looking back it really only should have taken about 8 weeks, oh well. I really started to learn the ins and outs of ASP.NET web forms development as well as a decent understanding of jQuery. After this project I got a few other notable tasks, mostly small and part of many other websites on campus. During the time I was working on the news site I got hired part-time by another department on campus.

I was originally hired by this department to create a single website for students who could not make it to campus for college orientation. After completing that I ended up developing several web based tools for the department and eventually started working on the departmental servers. I liked server administration about as much as I liked programming, and as such I eventually became the Network Administrator for the department while still doing a small amount of web work and still working at my original department. I was working usually well in excess of 40 hours a week at this point and still going to school.

After being a network administrator for about a year I was promoted to the Director of Intra University Computer Labs. While in this role I had around 20 people working for me, and I was in charge of the budget as well as the IT needs of the lab and the domain. This was shortlived however as the central IT group on campus decided to take me on as their web developer.

After transitioning to the new department full time I did a few small things for the Middleware group, and then I was finally given the opportunity to re-develop their website which had to have been 10 years out of date. The site took several months, and though the design wasn't great (but it sure was innovative), the code behind it all was (at that time in my career) some of the best I had written.

Work

I am currently employed by a small company in the Colorado Springs area called Seros. I work as a Security Engineer on a three man security team (the other two are Security Architects). I have a large focus area, but primarily focus in Identity and Access Management including Single Sign-On (I love customers with PingFederate), Federated Identity Management, and User Provisioning and Password Management.

Occasionally I also get to dive into the world of Network Architecture, Security Hardening and Penetration Testing, Business Continuity, Audit Logging, Security Policy and Standards, Secure Application Development, Regulatory Compliance (HIPPA, PCI DSS), and Security Design Patterns.

Hobbies

I don't have a ton of hobbies, but the three that stick out in my head are my Jeep, technology and photography.

Jeep

Stock Jeep

I bought my first Jeep in November of 2009. The Jeep was completely stock when I bought it, but I never really liked the look of stock Jeeps so I have slowly been working on modifying it.

The Jeep is also my daily driver so I am trying to go extreme as possibly without making it a dedicated trail rig or rock crawler.

Fortuately it seems that this hobby also end up being closely tied with my interest in photography. Not many people can make it up some Jeep trails, so some of the best pictures come from on and around the trail.

You can view my current specs as well as my future plans on my Jeep Build page.

Photography

I am certainly no professional photographer, but I do enjoy taking pictures. Right now I am shooting with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS Digital SLR. It has been a great camera for the past couple of years and I have gotten a decent shot or two.

I am considering switching sides and trying a Nikon sometime in the near future, but I am not sure what model yet.

Below are a few of my favorites (with a good probability of subject matter bias):

Technology

My Office

When working in IT isn't enough, I bring the fun home. I like to make technology an integral part of my living situation.

Here is what I run at home:

  • Main machine:
    • Corsair 800D case with integrated SATA III and USB 3
    • Asus Sabertooth P67 Motherboard
    • Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz (running at 4.0GHz)
    • Corsair Vengance 1600MHz 16GB (4x4GB)
    • eVGA GeForce GTX 580 FTW Hydro Copper 2 (3072 MB) (2x)
    • OCZ 60GB Sata III SSD (2x)
    • Western Digital 150 GB Raptor Drives (2x, Data drive, RAID 0)
    • Corsair 1200AX 1200 Watt Power Supply
    • Pioneer Blue-Ray/DVD/CD Burner
    • Aerocool V12XT Touch screen fan controller
    • Koolance 140mm radiator
    • XSPC 360mm radiator
    • XSPC X2O 750 12V Pump/Reservoir
    • XSPC CPU Waterblock
    • PrimoFlex Pro LRT UV Blue Tubing -1/2in. ID X 3/4in. OD (10 ft)
    • Thermochill Compression Fittings (12x)
    • 12" UV Cold Cathode (2x)
    • 25" LCD Monitor (2x)
    • 21" LCD Monitor (2x)
    • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Media Center:
    • Antec Skeleton Case
    • AMD Athlon X2 2.6 GHz
    • 4GB Corsair XMS (4x1GB)
    • nVidia 8800 GTX (2x, SLI)
    • 250GB HDD (OS)
    • 1TB HDD (x4, Data drives)
    • CentOS 6 (Samba Domain Controller, MediaTomb - UPNP Media Server)
  • Data Backup:
    • D-Link DNS-323 NAS Device (2x, 4TB/ea)

I use the Media Center PC to stream to my playstation, and the PC itself is connected to my 50" plasma in my living room. Since my apartment is not wired for ethernet I decided to flash an old Linksys WRT54G wireless G router I had lying around with the DD-WRT firmware. I then configuired it as a wireless bridge and connected my Media Center PC and playstation directly to it.

I use my main PC primarily for gaming (Team Fortress 2 mostly) and random projects I find myself either creating or working on almost all of which have to do with programming.