I’m Gabe, and I love solving problems in tech.

I enjoy working with tech and writing code, driving cars fast and driving fast cars, ballroom dancing, occasionally binging Netflix with my wife, and playing with our adorable dog. I have a fantastic life, and I'm incredibly grateful for every bit of it!

I have a very non-traditional background in tech and career progression. In college I wasn't a CS major, I was a Business major. But I spent my time at the apartment avoiding homework by doing things like tinkering with my Windows laptop to tweak the look and feel so that it looked more like a Mac, and other things that required modifying system files and the Windows registry. As you can imagine, I really messed up quite a few times and needed to figure out how to fix it. That became my learning process: try something new, screw up, learn to fix it, move on.

There came a time where our apartment router got messed up and weird things would happen like google.com would get redirected to some other search engine. I ended up figuring out that our router's DNS settings somehow got messed up by a piece of malware, and I had to figure out how to fix it and get rid of the malware. This got me into even more interesting topics in the world of computers. I started looking for other projects and things to do, and I discovered there were lots of cool tools like Wireshark. I read guides on how to set it up and use it. I would watch packets flying around my network and thought it was so cool, even though I had no idea what I was looking at. I downloaded Ettercap to try some man in the middle type things on the network and see what I could do. I eventually found Metasploit and a cheap spare laptop and would see if I could "hack" into it. It was fun; there was so much to do and to learn.

I eventually bought a book in C because, as my dad put it, "If you learn to code in C and you enjoy it, then you'll like being a programmer." And that was it. From there, while still in college, I joined a startup named Feathr as one of their first developers. I worked long and hard and developed my skills quite a bit. From there, I dove into the world of computer security doing vulnerability research and exploit development. I learned by reading through the Corelan exploit development series (which is super cool, by the way). That helped me land a job at Raytheon in security where I worked on all kinds of cool projects for ~7 years. It's not what you would consider traditional software engineering experience, but I worked on so many different things and it really helped me develop my problem solving skills.

Since then, I have leveraged those skills to do things like build mobile games, co-found a blockchain tech company named TabuArt, and land a job at Stripe in a role where I had very little practical experience but quickly grew to become a competent sales engineer. It's the most valuable skill I have, and I continue to improve that skill every day.