Welcome to Michael D. Bateman's home on the web.
Hard to believe, but I have been a network engineer for over 16 years now... with about 13 of that being a full time network engineer working on Cisco devices in an enterprise network environment.
I have done server administration (Windows and Red Hat Linux {and other *nix servers}) over the years as well an VMWare ESXi, vCloud Director, and other duties. Half the time I think I am more comfortable at a command prompt, but I do okay with just a GUI.
I really started learning offensive security back around 2001 when I worked as a member of a local computer incident response team going through network logs providing intrusion detection work. In 2003 I attended my first SANS class, and have been hooked on cyber security every since. Blue Team work was fun, but the offensive side is what interested me the most and I read books and took training over the years. In 2016 I began working to move out of 100% network engineering and in to offensive security (penetration testing and being a member of a Red Team). I currently work as a 'network engineer' for a red team, but what I do is nothing like what I did during those 13 years as a full time network engineer :)
I know how to script in Windows and Linux and can do a 'little' programming in Python, C#, C++, Assembly and a few other languages (I even dabbled in SNOBOL4 and Lisp back in my college days, so I can learn new, and old, things.) And I am slowly getting better and better at programming.