My name is Ron Bertino.

I was born in Argentina, moved to Australia when I was 5 years old, did all of primary school in Western Australia, shot back over to Argentina for 3 years, and then came back to Australia once again. Whew! You can blame my parents for being very indecisive….

In 1996 I made the move from Perth (Western Australia) to Sydney.

I went to the University of Western Australia. In 3rd year you had to decide between two majors: Computer Science and Information Technology. Most people chose one major or the other; some students chose to do Computer Science during their 3rd year and then do Information Technology in their 4th.

I banded together with a few other crazy friends of mine and we decided to do both majors during the same year. Boy was that a tough year! Everything overlapped: assignments, exams, and many times even lectures. We thought that saving a year of our lives was worth the risk. Some of us survived the challenge……..fortunately I was one of them.

Since I now had one extra year of study up my sleeve, and considering that I’ve always enjoyed teaching people, I decided to still do a 4th year of university, so I signed up to do a post-graduate diploma in education (DipEd) at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.

I met my wife in my second year of University (my wife was in her first year), we became best friends and then got married after we both graduated. Hey, I have no time to waste!

After that it was off to the real world. My first job was at a college teaching computing and maths. After teaching for 2 years I realized that teaching in high school is 70% management (for some reason the school didn’t approve of whipping and other forms of corporal punishment….go figure) and 30% teaching.

I was active in the forums of the Internet Service Provider (iiNet) always trying to help people out. Due to this, iiNet approached me and offered me a job which was a blend of software engineering work (ecommerce site development) and assisting with their helpdesk. I decided to take it on and leave my whips behind.

After a while I realized that there weren’t that many good job opportunities for growth in Perth, so I decided to move over to Sydney in 1994. I worked at another internet service provider (TPG), starting off doing further software engineering, but this is where I started to get into systems engineering as well. It didn’t take long for me to get a bit bored with the software engineering work and very interested in the systems engineering side.

I then made the official flip to systems engineering and worked my way through the ranks at a company called Sysygy Computer Networks. By the 3rd year I had been promoted to engineering manager, and I remained in that role for another 2 years, before deciding to move on.

In 2002 I joined a company called Professional Advantage as a senior systems engineer. I was then promoted to Engineering Manager, and then moved onto a Solutions Architect role.

During my stay at Professional Advantage, we became the most highly qualified Microsoft Gold Partner in Australia, winning the “Microsoft advanced infrastructure partner of the year award” in 2004, and the “Microsoft platform solution of the year award” in 2005, from solutions which I designed. The big deal about those two Microsoft awards is that we were up against every single IT integrator and solution provider in all of Asia-Pacific. So you can imagine that many of the “big dogs” were not happy at all…. (insert Dr Evil laugh here)

In September of 2007, I decided to leave Australia (after being there since I was 5 years old) and move on over to California, USA. I’m now working at one of the largest computing companies in the world as a Microsoft Consulting Practice Lead. I won’t mention the specific name, since I don’t want my personal opinions to potentially be seen as opinions of the company I work for.

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