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About
About Me
I'm Justin Cook, and if you want to know, here is some information about me. I'll try to keep it brief.
I currently live in London and work for a commodity trading company running their trading platforms. Most of my work revolves around IT infrastructure. Some self-observed qualities I possess are fine attention to detail, pragmatism, pronounced oral and written communication skills, exceptional technical skills and excellent people management.
I was born in the small town of Memphis, Texas, USA. My parents descended from modest families of cotton farming communities. During my formative years I could be seen running across the countryside trying to get my hands on everything in sight. Needless to say, I was a very curious child.
After high school (1994), I joined the US Navy, and after two years of electronics training, I was stationed on board USS ALASKA (SSBN 732). I worked in the division responsible for maintaining the tactical weapons systems, and after some time, I became the supervisor for that work center. I worked on some interesting technology -- not to mention the wide array of -- and experienced some very unique things. I received a well-rounded education on not only technology, but true mission-critical, highly-available systems and the encompassing efforts necessary to keep them running. Examples of the variety of technology I was exposed to are large I/O mainframes, data converters, HP-UX, Novell, Microsoft Windows NT and reliable protocols.
During this time, a friend and colleague introduced me to the Linux operating system. My technical curiosity is quite the large appetite. I find anything regarding bits and bytes fascinating, especially when computers and/or embedded systems are concerned. So, I dove head first in to the fascinating world of open source and have not looked back. There's still too much to explore!
From ALASKA, I moved on to the Naval Submarine School at Submarine Base New London, Connecticut. There I performed lecture- and lab-based instruction for fleet administrators on topics from network security, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Cisco and SAN storage. I was the first subject-matter expert for the Tactical Integrated Digital Systems II and Sublan platforms for Active Duty personnel. I had an immense amount of fun in our labs performing penetration testing and integration work mainly for my own personal gain. However, I did find a couple of critical flaws in which I was able to work with the main engineers to help remedy the problems.
It was primarily during this time that I became very interested in HPC systems. While finishing my computer science degree, I attended a parallel computing conference at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. There were some interesting people involved and attending from the MPICH and PVM communities, some government labs such as ORNL, other three-letter agencies and the University of Tennessee -- one of the academic organizations behind Top500.org. One of my major projects at university was the design and installation of a diskless beowulf cluster. I performed this work just prior to the Georgetown conference. It was this work and period that propelled me to the work I do today.
After separating from active duty, I moved to Moscow for two years to take up an infrastructure management position with a software company that provides software for commodity (primarily energy) traders. Not only was I able to work with an amazing team of highly-competent technical engineers, I learned a lot about people management, and was quite successful in my endeavors of leadership and making life-long friends -- which I believe are coupled tightly.
