Welcome to my business card website.

There's not a whole lot here. In my younger days I created new websites for fun, and ran several sites for serious. I was expecting to fully build out this site, plus a half dozen others for which I bought domain names. But family, church, and photography expanded to occupy my non-work time. Most of my “great ideas” were long ago built by someone else. (And they did a better job than I would have.) So now I mostly use hosted services like Squarespace and SmugMug, while my small forest of domains are mostly used for spamtraps and honeypots.

Professional Bio

Thank you Erika for this pic. It's me!

Networking and Security Software Engineer with 45 years of professional experience in every phase of product development, from conception through end-of-life. Shipped products for a broad range of platforms, including embedded, appliance, packaged software, and hosted services. Roles have ranged from individual contributor to project architect, on teams from 2 to 50 developers. Expertise in platforms, network layer 4 down, kernel and drivers, and security infrastructure. Keenly interested in software quality, availability, and serviceability.

Unprofessional Bio

I started taking stuff apart (and trying to put it back together) at age 3. It's only by the Grace of God I wasn't electrocuted. You think your kids were bad in a shopping mall? I'd find the emergency cutoff switch for the escalators. Right at eye level for a 3 year old. And it said “PUSH” right on it, so....

For my 4th birthday my uncle gave me a cigar box that contained a light switch, a bulb, and a battery. I would sit for hours just turning the light on and off. It kept me entertained and out of the house wiring.

Do not disturb. Nerd at work.

At age 13 I was introduced to an ASR-33 teletype connected to our school's HP-2000F computer. It was love at first sight. I wrote games, learned the fundamentals of system breaking, and argued with my teachers over submitting term papers in all upper case. I ported my games to a Tektronix 4023 graphics terminal, designed and built digital hardware, programmed microprocessors, and competed nationally in industrial electronics (which had just all gone digital).

After a failed attempt to earn an Electrical Engineering degree, I spent a year as a lab rat and instructor at Michigan Tech, then came to Silicon Valley “to work for a few years.” I wrote software for graphics, embedded I/O, filesystems, networking, Email, and platforms, largely making my mark by working on projects no one else wanted to work on. I developed a keen interest in software reliability, serviceability, maintainability, and security, all of which are largely facets of the same problem.

Bar hopping with your kids is fun! Who knew?

Somehow along the way I managed to get married and raise 3 kids, which quashed any notions of moving back to the Midwest. My kids got interested in a lot of things — baseball, soccer, music, marching band, volunteering — and I got interested in those too, camera in hand. They're all grown now, financially independent, still speaking to me, and they're really good people, too. Whether that's because of me or in spite of me remains unclear.

I indefinitely left the workforce in July 2023. I'm usually hacking, researching family history, taking pictures, or engaged in one of my or my wife's volunteer projects. To the outside observer I'm pretty sure I look like a boring old nerd; but my life has been full and blessed indeed.

My Websites

• Gutekunst Family Photography. Pictures from the photogs in the family plus friends who didn't have sites of their own. Hosted by SmugMug.

• Gutekunst.Org — Home Of the Red Cow. My genealogy and family history site. When I built this site in 2002 it looked pretty cool, and people complemented me on the little tricks I did with Javascript. Now I'm not sure it even qualifies as “quaint.” Desperately needs an update; I have over over 8000 people in my tree now. But I want to keep the cow-and-blackletter motif.

• Mastodon. It's a strange little place, but I've carved out a comfy niche for myself, satisfying my social media itch and sharing landscape, bird, and garden photos. (I did consider its photo-centric sibling Pixelfed, but it doesn't really fit with how I use social media. And the folks there are kinda scary.)

• My Discover Nikkei profile. People have suggested that this might be a good place for me to publish articles about my work. Still thinking about it. I think I'd need to parter with an actual writer.

• My LinkedIn profile. My business rolodex. I check in here maybe once a month, if that.

• My GitHub Home. Under reconstruction. I had accumulated a lot of (*ahem*) drek here: code samples and scripts that people asked me to share, but were more appropriate for a private FTP server or gist. Multiple hiring managers have told me they value prospects GitHub pages more than their LinkedIn profile, so I'd still like to make this pretty, even if I'm not looking for employment.