My name is Mike Walker, and I write Boost, Bytes, and Brews. I started this blog in 2009 to be my own space for various rambling about three of my hobbies, cars, technology, and beer (both drinking and brewing).

To give you little background about myself, I was born in the East Side suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio in 1984. I believe that my interest in cars comes from the fact that my Dad is an Auto Mechanic for a major manufacturer dealership. Growing up I was always around cars, whether it was at the dealership or going with him to car shows. I’m not exactly sure where my interest in technology came from. When I was in elementary school I enjoyed playing with the Apple IIe computers that were in our computer lab. As I got older, my parents gave me my first computer which was a hand-me-down Commodore Amiga 500. I tinkered with that machine for quite some time, and it actually still works fairly well. One of my favorite parts about it was the voice synthesizer that I insisted on using as my parent’s outgoing answering machine message. From the Amiga, I graduated to a NEC Personal Computer that was equipped with an Intel 386, and Windows 3.1. It was this computer that gave me my first online experience, using a dial up BBS called the “Cleveland Free-net”. I still remember my email from that service, iq590@cleveland.freenet.edu. Other highlights in my personal computing career were my family’s Packard Bell Pentium 133MHz that I used to play Duke Nukem 3D over the phone while everyone was asleep (We only had one phone line growing up). The Packard Bell opened up the world wide web to me via everyone’s favorite Dial-up service, AOL. Since then I’ve gradually upgraded hardware and software to keep up with the ever changing technical world.

Formally I have a Bachelors of Science in Computer and Information Science from Cleveland State University. While earning my degree I participated in two summer internship opportunities in the Las Vegas area working for a government contractor. The internship was with the UNIX System Administrators at that company, and it really gave me a different view of IT that was operations, contrary to my education which primarily involved development. After finishing my degree in 2006, I worked for a small IT Consulting Firm in Cleveland. Later that same year, the contractor in Las Vegas made me a formal offer and paid to relocate me to that area. I worked at that company for a few years, and in 2009 I found employment at a magazine company as their System Administrator.

Homebrewing is my third hobby and interest. Starting in 2008, I have begun brewing my own beer in 5 gallon batches. A good friend of mine from high school, Ari, really got me interested in this and I really enjoy it.

Be sure to check out my other About pages for more details and drop me a line over at my Contact Me page or any of my Social Networking sites.