About

Overview

My name is Matthew Burr, and I am an IT consultant and contractor in the Greater Toronto Area.

I have over 15 years of experience specializing in network and systems administration, as well as network security and network architecture. I have worked in various industries in my career including government, social media, manufacturing, non-profits, software development, retail, and financial services.

I have also volunteered with various non-profit organizations in the GTA, both in IT and non-IT roles.

I also provide independent consulting and contracting services. I own and operate Ten Fifteen Solutions, which is my IT consulting and contracting business that I have been running since early 2016. I provide various services, including:

Cloud Migrations and Hybrid Cloud Deployments
Network Auditing
Network Design and Implementation
Network Security Consultation
Project Implementation
Systems Administration
Technical Writing

I am certified in various technologies, including Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and VMware.

Education

I attended Cambrian College of Applied Arts and Technology in Sudbury, Ontario from September 2006 to May 2009 where I received a diploma in Computer Systems Technology (CETY). I picked this college because of the high rating of the program at the time, and the fact that many of the instructors worked directly for Cisco and Microsoft. I also liked Sudbury and Northern Ontario in general, which was an appealing aspect of choosing that institution over others that were closer to home. I look back fondly of my time at Cambrian College, I thank all of success to the excellent instructors and resources that I had while I was there.

At the end of my time at Cambrian College I was chosen to represent my class at the Skills Ontario competition in Waterloo, Ontario for IT and Network Support from May 4 to May 6, 2009. I ended up winning first place in that competition. Several weeks later, I went to the Skills Canada competition in Charlottetown, PEI for IT and Network Support from May 19 to May 23, 2009, and I also won first place in that category as well.

I strongly believe in this competition and what it stands for, and I have even volunteered as a judge for that competition in May 2018, 2019, and 2021 at the Skills Ontario Competition in Toronto, Ontario. I have written about my experience with this competition at both the Skills Ontario and Skills Canada competitions.

Experience

I mainly support Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco devices (switches/routers/firewalls), AWS/Azure and virtually all Microsoft technologies. I have a great deal of experience with network design and implementation, and I have successfully deployed and supported complex networking solutions for several companies.

As I have told employers in the past, I am not a developer. Even though I have a very good understanding of several programming languages (C, C++, C#, and Java), I do not program for a living. I prefer the networking and systems administration side of IT and I only program as a hobby. I take those skills and I can apply it to the DevOps philosophy that has become so popular and necessary in the last few years.

Publications

I have released several publications over the last few years, all of which can be found on the Publications page. Some of these publications are available for free, and some are available for purchase. All publications that I have released are available on Gumroad and Amazon, and those are the only two platforms that I use to release content on.

If you find any of my publications elsewhere, please contact me.

Daily Drivers

I am currently using the following equipment for my daily personal usage:

Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max

I also have an HP EliteDesk 600 G3 Mini (Intel Core i5-7500T, 32 GB RAM, Windows Server 2022) that I use for running virtual machines on Hyper-V, and that is only for testing purposes. I run all my important virtual machines on cloud services, and I don’t run anything locally that I rely on.

VS Code is my text editor of choice and as the IDE for all projects that I do. Most of my daily workflow uses VS Code in some capacity, usually with GitHub involved.

Even though I don’t like to keep old things, I collect old laptops and other legacy devices. I have also been getting into the whole retro computing craze and revisiting a lot of the computers I used when I was a kid, including the Commodore 64 and early DOS machines.

Website Technology Stack

This website was previously hosted on WordPress.com up until the end of 2021 and was moved to a different platform and hosting provider. Currently, this website is using the following platforms for content management and hosting:

Cloudflare - For DNS hosting and various other services.
GitHub - For hosting the website’s Git repository.
Hugo - For content management and static HTML generation.
Netlify - For website hosting.

I am using the Hugo Clarity theme with very minor modifications.

The contents of this website are available publicly on GitHub.

Personal

I was born and raised in Lindsay, Ontario. I have lived and worked in the Greater Toronto Area since 2010.

I decided several years ago to not use social media. I deleted my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts in early 2018, and I have no plan on ever using those platforms again. I do not like the way that social media propagates false information and I do not want to participate in those platforms because of that.

Why Did I Create This Website?

I created this website for a few reasons, mostly because I haven’t had a significant web presence in a long time. I had a blog back in the early 2000’s, but I never put a lot of effort into it at the time and it ended up being lost to the web (I don’t even remember where it was hosted or what the address was). I wanted a permanent presence on the web that was completely under my control where I could showcase that I am currently working on, share my thoughts on certain topics, and share things that I find interesting.

I may use this website to showcase things that I have created and may be for sale, but that will be on a specific basis, and I will always be upfront about that.

I will never have any third-party advertisements on this website. Advertisements suck, and I only created this website because I wanted to, and I never intended to use advertisements to profit from it. I have moved this website to a free hosting provider since launching it back in 2018, so I don’t exactly need to recoup any costs associated with the website since the costs are zero.

I also don’t allow for public comments to be posted on this website. I don’t have the time or energy to moderate those comments and I already get several dozen spam messages a day, so I don’t want to take the time to moderate those. If someone really needs to get a hold of me, it is not difficult to do.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions that are expressed on this website are mine alone, and do not reflect those of my current or previous employers. I will never post anything on this website that is related to any of my employers or clients without their express permission.

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Contact

If you would like to contact me by email, feel free to send me a message at matthew[at]mjcb[dot]io. Please use this PGP Key for encryption if possible. I am not always prompt with responding to messages, so if you don’t hear from me immediately it is not because I am ignoring the message, I just haven’t had the chance to properly respond to it.