I am Steve Burns.
A battle-tested Cloud & System Engineer with over 15 years in the IT industry.
When I am not earning money or working on projects around my house I love spending time with my beautiful wife Darcy, playing with my amazing kids, learning to be a more faithful follower of Christ, and helping my friends.
While based in the South Bend, Indiana region, I have worked with companies both locally and internationally. I have worked for a variety of companies, from education and manufacturing to startups and 100+ year old financial institutions.
I started out humbly performing IT work for a few local businesses in 2006. In 2009 I worked part time in a small college IT department. Then a few years later I became the Lead Technician at a local IT shop.
From there I grew to become a Web Developer and System Administrator at a very large school system and have continued to advance to even more senior roles leading teams and building and managing complex cloud and on-premise systems.
Outside of my family and my career, I volunteer my time to help teach a local First Lego League Youth Robotics team and I also enjoy using my IT and audio engineering skills to serve at my church.
I am a life long learner, you will regularly find me knee deep in yard work listening to a podcast on religion, politics, philosophy, technology, or human psychology.
In fact that life long obsession with learning started when I was really young.
A short history…
- As a young child I would take stuff apart to see how they worked, everything from a radio to a camera, from a VCR to a PlayStation, I had to know what made it tick.
- As a preteen I would regularly break my parents computer as I would change settings and experiment just to learn.
- Finally at 15 I purchased my first computer and began creating presentations that impressed older adults and college students with the level of quality I put into my work.
- Then at 16 my family got high-speed internet and I got introduced to Linux.
- By 17 I was educating my trade school teacher on Linux and I helped her develop curriculum for some of her college level introductory computer courses.
- At 19 I started my first job in IT as a work study in the IT department of a small college.
- At 26 I was managing servers and software for a German software company that provided services to millions of users throughout the globe.
Achievements
Over the years, I have managed IT systems for Schools, multinational software companies, startups, and 125 year old insurance companies.
I have…
- Created large IT systems that support between 5,000 and 20,000 users throughout the US and the World.
- Migrated the infrastructure of multimillion dollar companies to the cloud.
- Collaboratively designed and built systems that provide services to hundreds of thousands to millions of global users.
- Rescued large crashed databases during urgent time sensitive outages.
- Fixed a vendors software for the vendor after an official update broke a key feature.
- Prevented long term outages by tackling them at 1:30 am and working through the night.
- Saved companies hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
To see a more comprehensive list of my accomplishments check out my greatest hits and achievements here.
I constantly pursue new knowledge and work hard to increase my skills set. I apply the same problem solving focus and desire to learn to nearly every other part of life. This includes:
- FROM Cloud Systems Engineering TO live audio engineering
- FROM web design & photography TO automotive repair (except engines and transmissions)
- FROM database troubleshooting TO correct medical diagnosis
(often 6-14 months before the doctor and up to 86% of the time).
Software & Me …
I am a advocate for using free and opensource software whenever possible, as I believe it is a powerful force for good, for cost savings, and for technological advancement. However, I also recognize there are some limitations of such software and I will concede and use propriety software when appropriate such as with Microsoft Office and even Microsoft Windows in corporate settings.
Many people do not realize it but free and open-source software is used by hundreds of the largest and most successful companies in the world, many of whom sponsor the development of the software themselves. Some examples include: Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Lowes, and the United States government.
Health Research
Finally if you have made it this far you may find it interesting to know that I am a have done an insane amount of health research. Currently, I have spent easily over 4,500 hours of research reading over 1,400 full medical articles, studies, research papers, journals, and medical textbook sections, spanning 10+ different medical disciplines.
I find the medical world to be extremely fascinating because in many ways the human body operates like a extraordinarily complex computer system. So I find that many of the root cause based problem solving approaches I take with computers often translate nicely to health and medical topics.
Some topics of my medical research include:
- Links between technology use and mental health, especially in social media use in young children.
- Long term negative effects on health following parasitic infection after travel to 3rd world and developing nations, often despite clear signs of infection (aka travels illness).
- Links between hidden / subclinical infections and chronic health issues
- Prevention of birth defects (primarily Neural Tube Defects)
- Determining what factors can kickoff autoimmune related illnesses.
Some of my research was to help friends or family and other times it was pure curiosity.
More Info
Call or email me if you have any questions, comments, concerns, snide remarks, or employment opportunities.