Hello, I am Dave Pryke, a husband to a wonderful wife, a father to three wonderful children, and a “techie” – someone that works, plays with, and thinks about geeky, technical things quite often.

As a long time IT guy, I am a “Jack of all trades” and even a master of many of them. I dive deep into every project on which I work, trying to make sure I understand as much as I can of the underpinnings of a system before making any recommendations or changes. Previously employed as a full time programmer [1], a Systems Administrator managing the full stack of systems [2], a Senior IT Engineer [3], and currently a Director of IT [4], I have plenty of fun things to keep me busy in my work.

While I have passions in technology, I also love to leave it all behind, and enjoy the great outdoors without the chime, ring, or buzz of a cellphone or hum of a transformer nearby.

I feel strongly that all of us humans living together need to continually try to keep an open mind, look at every situation from various perspectives, try to “walk a mile in each other’s shoes,” take a deep breath, be kind, and understand that every person is an individual with a unique perspective, history, and story. Let’s try to learn more about each other every day!

My strongest passions in the world, though, are for my family, the woods and mountains of Appalachia, and playing the euphonium.  These are the things make me happy on any day.  On every day.

[1] Developing internal company software for order entry, ticketing systems, billing, reports, dashboards, and so on, in C, Visual Basic, and QuickBasic as well as web development in PHP and MySQL.

[2] Procuring hardware, provisioning systems, managing pools/clusters of VM nodes/hypervisors, deploying code, maintaining and improving security, developing business strategy relating to technology, coordinating disruptive maintenance, monitoring hosts/services/networks, and all those usual “systems” things like patching, upgrading, configuring, and so on and so forth. I’m quite familiar with Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and have some MacOSX experience. I also continually write small programs in BaSH, Python, PHP, Powershell, tcsh, etc., to facilitate systems functions, and put together the occasional web page with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

[3] Designing, developing, and deploying complex technological systems. Writing and applying security policy, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and maturing the IT strategy and infrastructure of a company. Developing and documenting policy and procedure that is simple, repeatable, secure, and efficient for the business. Mentoring those around me to raise their skill level and confidence in technology while continually seeking to advance my own knowledge and skills.

[4] IT Budgeting and managing annual expenditures and software contracts, acquiring cybersecurity insurance, obtaining SOC 2 Type II certification, using the NIST & CIS frameworks to guide policy and action, managing IT teams, deciding when to use on-prem or cloud infrastructure, deploying zero-trust environments, establishing secure communications between networks, handling all IT security policy and the responsible use of technology (particularly considering the expansion of GenAI tools and usage in the modern world!), and so on.

[*] I try to become proficient at every technical task I take on, and try to become an expert at anything that I do on a regular basis. I also have very strong experience with networks, and considerable experience with multiple types of databases.