About

Heya! 👋🏼 I’m Adil.

I started out in a neuroscience research lab at UBC. I was supposed to be helping run experiments, but I kept ending up responsible for the servers. Eventually, that became the job. I left with a few published papers and an appreciation for both the brains we studied and the machines we used to study them. The machines were easier to reboot when something went wrong, and they had better documentation.

I moved into a sysadmin role at The University of British Columbia and stayed for more than a decade. That is where I got deep into PowerShell and started automating the repetitive parts of the job. I liked solving problems once and building systems that meant fewer late-night calls.

After UBC, I worked on package management and artifact security at Chocolatey and Cloudsmith, then moved into identity at Okta. Today I’m a Senior Solutions Engineer at Wiz, helping customers solve cloud security problems. These jobs sound different on paper, but they all involve figuring out how systems fail and helping people make them safer.

I co-founded the Pacific Northwest PowerShell User Group and co-hosted BridgeConf. I also speak at conferences and write about PowerShell, automation, cloud, and security.

Outside of work, I like building 4dl apps and other side projects of questionable utility, collecting far too many stickers, fussing over travel tech, and snowboarding. I also spend a lot of time trying to explain cybersecurity without turning it into jargon. Security is more useful when people actually understand it.