tom@techcolumnist:~$

~/about.md

About Tom Lasswell

# Tom Lasswell, Director of IT at DC BLOX in Atlanta, has written TechColumnist since 2007 about PowerShell, NetApp, VMware and running IT teams.

Tom Lasswell in a DC BLOX data center, hard hat and high-vis

$ cat README.md

TechColumnist started in 2007 as a place to keep the answers I kept having to look up twice. It is still that. Most posts here are field notes: a PowerShell script that saved a weekend, a NetApp procedure that the docs described badly, a storage or virtualization gotcha that cost real hours. If a post gets you to a working answer faster than a vendor KB would, it did its job.

The tagline, Directives from a Director, dates from when I first ran an engineering division. These days I run IT for a data center operator, but the site has stayed hands-on on purpose. Longer essays on leadership and service management moved to lasswell.me; this site is for the terminal. The full profile, career history and board work live on lasswell.me/about.

$ git log --reverse | head

My dad wrote the best summary of how this started, as a LinkedIn recommendation years ago:

In 1990, Thomas got his first computer, an IBM PC. He was six at the time. He used it for a few days, then I walked past his room and found the computer in pieces on his bed. I asked him why and he replied it was too slow. By that afternoon he had it back together and benchmarking better than before. I have no idea what he changed.

— Thomas E. Lasswell

The rest followed the same pattern: wiring a middle school for its first computers, building overclocked water-cooled PCs in high school, and a five-year co-op degree at Wentworth that alternated classes with real jobs. I have been the person who takes the machine apart ever since.

$ history | grep career

  1. 2025 – now

    Director, ITDC BLOX

    Enterprise IT for a Southeast data center and connectivity operator. Automation, resilience, and a lot of infrastructure-as-code.

  2. 2026 – now

    Board, Director of TechnologyAtlanta Technology Professionals

  3. 2023 – 2025

    Sr. Director, IT Infrastructure & ServicesEdible Brands

    Cloud-native Azure, DevOps pipelines, Zero Trust, unified observability.

  4. 2018 – 2023

    VP, IT OperationsCortavo

    Built an MSP from scratch: Autotask, RMM, Intune, VMware, DaaS.

  5. 2013 – 2018

    Architect → Director, Engineering & Supportivision

    60+ person team across NOC, engineering, architecture and service desk. Autotask and LogicMonitor.

  6. 2011 – 2013

    Systems Engineer, NetAppCDW

    100k+ air miles a year. ONTAP upgrades, FAS controller swaps, Brocade and Cisco fabric, FlexPod.

  7. 2005 – 2011

    Technical Engineer → Sr. Engineer → Manager, Infrastructure EngineeringCBS Corporation

    Los Angeles. SMS 2003 rollout, desktop standards, NetApp, 3PAR, Brocade, cross-country data centers.

  8. 2003 – 2005

    Jr. Engineer, co-opBain & Company, EZE Castle Integration, contracts

    Ghost imaging, Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 on PowerEdge and ProLiant, hedge-fund trading desks.

  9. 1999 – 2002

    Computer TechnicianComputers NLA, Carson, CA

    The high-school job. Custom Intel and AMD builds, small networks, counter service.

$ uname -a

Work stack, in rough order of how much of my life it has consumed: NetApp and SAN/NAS storage, VMware, Windows Server and Hyper-V, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Cisco UCS, PowerShell, ITIL-shaped service management, CI/CD pipelines, and lately Copilot and other AI tooling wired into all of the above.

Education: B.S. Computer Engineering Technology and A.A.S. Electronic Engineering Technology from Wentworth Institute of Technology; Executive MBA from Kennesaw State (Beta Gamma Sigma); currently in the Chief Information and Digital Officer certificate program at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College. Certs that still matter: ITIL Foundation, LogicMonitor Certified Professional.

$ ls ~/projects

  • Home Assistant integrations. Custom components published on GitHub, including govee-homeassistant and navien-homeassistant, plus a house full of MQTT, Shelly, Flair vents and a Carrier Infinity system that all talk to each other.
  • WLED architectural lighting. Custom builds on 24V COB RGBW strip in stainless U-channel. More precision than the job requires, which is the point.
  • membrik. A personal software project that I will write about when it is further along. It currently pages me more than production does.
  • This site. Nuxt Content on Firebase, migrated off WordPress in 2026 after nineteen years. The migration notes are a series in progress.

$ ping tom

tom@lasswell.me or LinkedIn are the reliable routes. X for shorter things. If a script here saved you an afternoon, or broke something and you fixed it, I want to know either way.