How I Got Here: After teenage resistance, this coding teacher’s son found his way back to tech

“I was really opposed to going into technology because my mom was the technology teacher at the high school I went to, and like any teenager, I did everything I could to avoid taking a class by my mom,” Porter told Technical.ly. “So a career path in technology just was not in my future, at least that’s what I thought.”

Instead, Porter went to college and majored in business administration, but realized pretty quickly that it was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Stuck on what to do next, he dropped out and took a job at a furniture store. While he was working there, the store was in need of some IT work, and as someone that had been around computers his whole life, he offered to help. He ended up doing a number of repairs on the store’s computers and building out a complete wireless network that covered its whole campus.

Enter: the beginning of a winding, education-laden career.

‘Big data and databases, all kinds of good stuff’

This work inspired him to go back to school, and he decided he wanted to do something in the IT field. He tried hardware engineering but decided that wasn’t for him, either. So he switched to what he knew: networking. Right when he had turned in his final exam, he got a call from Entegra Bank offering him a job.

“It was really good for me because it exposed me to a lot of different areas within IT,” Porter said of the work at the company that’s since merged with First Citizens Bank. “It exposed me to network administration, of course, but also systems administration, some programming. [I] also got some exposure into working with big data and databases, all kinds of good stuff.”

While working there full-time as a network administrator and network systems engineer (and balancing a family with kids), Porter went back to school to get his bachelor’s degree in IT with a concentration in network administration. After completing his degree, he snagged a role at Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technology, working with big data infrastructure and design.

But he wasn’t done with school just yet. After spending some time at Honeywell, he went back to school again to get a master’s degree in data analytics, with a focus on machine learning. With that, he was able to open up his role in the data. From there, he took a role as a senior systems architect III at Geocent before taking on his current position with the same title at Woodbridge, Virginia’s Sev1Tech after it acquired Geocent in October 2021.

Forward motion, and a return

Porter is based at Sev1Tech’s Huntsville, Alabama office but frequently travels to its headquarters in the DMV, as well as the company’s other offices across the US to support the IT consulting company’s various customers. The travel-forward nature of the job pairs well with his professional journey that’s followed technology’s twists and turns.

With each of his roles, Porter said he followed the data path, starting over in big data and machine learning and then moving into the field of digital threat and digital twin. This switch represented one of his favorite things about tech: that it constantly inspired him to push forward, learn more and make the most of himself. The industry never stays stagnant, he said, so it forces workers to keep learning and growing.

“If you kind of sit back on your laurels and just say: ‘Well, I know how to do this and I’m just going to keep doing this,’ then you’ll quickly fall behind and you’ll find yourself without a job,” Porter said.

Next up for Porter, he said, is continuing to work and build unique machine learning models and capabilities for the government. But his career has already come back to its roots in his mom’s classroom. About once a week, he has talks with his mom about what’s going on in her classroom and the programming languages she plans to teach. And he’s even gotten the chance to go back to his mom’s school and give a few presentations to the students on his work.

“I’ve been able to go back and present to the students just to get them interested in the field,” Porter said. “So it’s actually a pretty cool experience to go full circle, being so opposed to it as a teenager and then now fully embracing it.”

This is How I Got Here, a series where we chart the career journeys of technologists. Want to tell your story? Get in touch.