About

Heya! 👋 I’m Adil.

My tech origin story starts in a neuroscience research lab, where managing servers between experiments gradually became my actual job. I ended up with a few published papers and an equal appreciation for both the brains we studied and the machines we used to study them. The machines were just easier to reboot when something went wrong, and had better documentation.

From there I landed at The University of British Columbia as a sysadmin, where I discovered PowerShell and never quite recovered. I spent over a decade there, automating anything I had to do more than twice. Somewhere along the way I realized the job wasn’t really about fixing things—it was about building automated resilient systems that let me sleep through the night.

From there, things got interesting. I went deep into package management and artifact security at Chocolatey and Cloudsmith—if you ever want to hear my thoughts on dependency management, bring snacks. Then I moved into IAM (Identity and Access Management) at Okta, where I learned to speak fluent SAML and developed opinions about token lifetimes that I mostly keep to myself. Now I’m a Cloud Solutions Architect at Palo Alto Networks, focused on cloud and cybersecurity—which turns out is where you land when you’ve spent years thinking about supply chains, identity, and all the creative ways things can go sideways.

I co-founded the Pacific Northwest PowerShell User Group, co-hosted BridgeConf, and somehow became someone who speaks at conferences and writes about this stuff. It still surprises me, honestly.

Outside of work, I build apps and side projects of questionable utility, maintain a sticker collection that has exceeded reasonable bounds, obsess over travel tech, and snowboard. I’m also passionate about making cybersecurity accessible for everyone—because security works better when everyone understands it, and gatekeeping helps no one.