During my college years, I found my church home at St. Mary and St. Anthony Coptic Church in Ridgewood, NY. The church was over an hour away by train, but the friendships and depth in the bible studies were so filling.

Over my time there, I wired and built up their network infrastructure by getting and configuring donated cisco equipment. I redid their website including organizing all the online books and adding an option to donate online. I setup their first streaming and recording setups to capture some of the bible studies. With a friend, I actually reclaimed an attic space and built it up as a control center for streaming.

To this day, the priest asks me if I’m still floating the roof, as he would often see me running wires or setting up cameras. I even ran ethernet cables to each camera and terminated them with custom serial connections to control the PTZ using a visca computer program. I smile thinking of the time there, and although the church (thankfully) has upgraded all the systems, I think I planted the seeds of the IT service there.