About Joel Nicolas

I was born in Oakland, California as a Filipino-American and I spent the first 18 years of my life on an island of Sitka, Alaska hanging out with my friends and being totally immersed in music as a saxophonist. I never knew growing up that technology was going to be such a big part of my life so I spent most of my younger years playing all kinds of sports and enjoying the outdoors. I joined the Army right after high school and went around the world and back again and gained a lot of experience as a Signal Corp Sergeant. After the Army I went on to graduate from Texas State University-San Marcos with a BBA in Computer Information Systems and Quantitative Methods in 2005. Upon graduation I worked at USAA, a Fortune 200 company, as a WebSphere Systems Engineer. As a father and nerdy systems administrator I moved to the greater Seattle area where I am currently living and working in Olympia, Washington as an Applications Infrastructure Architect and I have been living-it-up ever since...

The Admin

I first became interested in computers in high school when the first web app I can remember was Hotmail pre Microsoft days. I guess I was always interested in tech, but it wasn't until college I decided that was what I was going to be doing for a living. In college many of the courses were designed for developers, but when I had my first professional job and I was introduced to Operations. A whole new world opened up for me while supporting the infrastructure that would run all the applications the developers have created for the internet...

The Site

This site is a personal blog and portfolio of Joel Nicolas. It started out as just an idea of a portal in which I could share some photos and videos with family with a URL that was easy to remember ...so I bought my first domain name from Network Solutions and Hosted this site from Hostgator with an install of Joomla 1.7 and started posting content with web services from Vimeo and Flickr. I hope that you have enjoyed your visit and learned a little bit more about me and check back for some updates. If you want to keep in touch you can do so from this site and I look forward to hearing from you.

~Joel