Laurent Delfosse - Summary
My career path in IT began before college, when I focused on Computer Systems while attending Thomas Jefferson H.S. for Science & Technology. After surviving TJ, at West Virginia University I received a degree in Computer Science, where coursework at the time covered software development (C++, Ada) as well as compiler and OS design (how quaint!). While in school I got my first system administrator job, and once I graduated migrated out to Silicon Valley with this background, finding myself part of the dot-com bubble. On arriving in California, my first position was with Taos Mountain where I moved from contract to contract, mostly different positions within Sun Microsystems (as I was a Unix admin). Next I took some initiative and formed my own company, cleverly called The Delfosse Company. Most Delfosse Co contracting work in California continued to be performed at Sun Microsystems, and included everything from internal user and desktop support (Sun), to internal "lab" support of large numbers of Sun servers, to supporting the Sun MicroElectronics chip testing lab. I worked with almost every class of Sun hardware from this period. I was a primary contact for several projects, where I managed project servers and resources.

As the dot-com bubble burst, I moved to work in the financial industry, contracting at Goldman Sachs in their Tokyo office. This was primarily infrastructure support and expansion (EWarrant and Moon Trade were implemented during this timeframe). The small team went through rapid changes during this time, and I completed my contract as the team lead for a group which managed Equities UNIX application servers that handled large amounts of financial information in a 24x7 environment.

After the experience of living and working overseas, I returned back to the DC area. My first Federal contract was working on HR-Connect at the US Treasury, where they were consolidating the large number of HR systems within the Treasury offices and bureaus into a centrally managed PeopleSoft HR solution. I worked closely with application developers in this position.
My next position was at Savvis (CW, Exodus, now CenturyLink, Lumen), where I joined a team providing project support on a contract for e-business components of the General Service Administraton (GSA). In this position I delivered a project on a mid-scale Networker backup solution (formerly Solstice Backup), documented and presented reliability reports to the customer, and trained and transitioned Operations personnel on procedures.
Next I briefly left Federal contracting and worked at a non-profit (!) finance company ICMA-RC (now MissionSquare). The company's primary business is retirement plans for public sector employees (teachers, police, fireman, etc.). 'RC' was in rapid expansion during this period, and this is where I first started to broaden my expertise to include web services and security. These combined skills would eventually be termed 'DevSecOps' in the industry.

I made a career move towards management when I took a team lead position on a Federal contract with Fulcrum IT Services (now part of HII). This was at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts: little did I know that this would be my customer for the next 15 years! I started as lead of the Web Services team where my areas of focus were system administration, security, and web services. Next I moved to virtualization and cloud computing while working on a validation team for a VMware Private Cloud deployment. I had a brief foray into Enterprise Architecture, but have returned to Operations where I currently work on VMware NSX, used primarily in the Private Cloud environment.

Last update: Apr, 2019.

Laurent Delfosse