Jayson Lindsley

Ever since I was little I've been obsessed with computers, and with getting past whatever was telling me "no." Poking around in the BIOS, decompiling software, bypassing security checks, breaking things just to see how they worked.

One early lesson: I wanted to install Red Alert 2 on our Windows 95 machine, and it needed more hard drive space. The solution seemed easy enough. Find space. So I went looking, and I deleted the drivers folder in System32. New problem: a machine with no audio that couldn't get online. New quest: fix it. I made friends with the middle school tech, who loaned me a Windows 98 install disc. It wouldn't install, so he handed me a floppy with instructions on a sticky note to kick-start the installation. It worked.

It didn't stop there. I was constantly tinkering, trying to do things I had no business doing, and it eventually landed me a job in tech repair. I got hired because I could answer a question about Winsock repair in Windows XP. I only knew the answer because I'd broken my own Winsock installing a patch to raise the max number of TCP connections I was allowed.

I crawled my way up to decompiling malware: isolating it, tearing it apart with IDA Pro, OllyDbg, and Process Monitor, and writing custom scripts to unroll the modifications adware had made. I learned to read the raw bytes off a Windows drive to figure out why the MBR was corrupted by TDSS, a popular rootkit at the time.

Somewhere along the way I started building tools for the machines I was fixing, and somehow that turned into web development.

I joined MyOutDesk as an engineer fixing a large codebase and two native applications, then rose to Director of IT. Today I lead a medium-size team that covers everything IT touches, from compliance to application development. It's CTO-level work in practice. Along the way I picked up technical SEO and measuring SEO as data, leadership, stable application design, Salesforce development and administration, and everything in between that's been built under my leadership.

And my curiosity, just like back then, keeps me deeply involved at every layer. I cannot help but get involved. It's who I am. That's the wildcard part. I just can't help it.