Greetings! I’m Michael Chouinard. I live in Wichita Falls, Texas, about an hour and a half northwest of Dallas. I live here with my wife and our three youngest children. With us, we have our ten year old Boxer, Thor.
Until Covid, both my wife and I had lived our entire lives in Vermont. With everything going remote, we saw the opportunity of a lifetime. We packed up, moved out of our house, and became nomads. We spent the next year and a half living full-time in our travel trailer, which along the line was upgraded to a fifth-wheel.
In my professional life, I am loving life at Zscaler. I am on the Technical Enablement team of our REV (Revenue, Enablement & Velocity) organization. More specifically, in my current role I am a Demo Architect. I am part of a small team responsible for ensuring our technical sales folks have everything the need to showcase our solutions to their customers. I manage our demo and lab environments, I write lab guides, and help out anywhere I can. Prior to joining Zscaler, I spent five years as a presales systems engineer for Dell EMC, covering accounts throughout northern New England. Even before that I was an IT Admin/Jack-of-all-trades for a Vermont credit union.
I recently stepped down as co-leader of a successful VMware User Group – Champlain Valley VMUG (@cvvmug). I helped co-found the group back in 2015 and we had a heck of a run. I learned a lot during my time with VMUG and made a lot of friends and connections that I hope will be with me for the long run. Having moved away from Vermont and away from VMware, it made sense to hand the reigns over to some new folks.
I have spent a large portion of my life obsessed with technology. I have spent a smaller portion of my life drinking lots of beer and bourbon. Living in Vermont, I fell in love with the many microbreweries and their offerings. It took a little while, but I became of huge fan of New England style IPAs. But, depending on my mood and the season, I am open to other options! I have also started growing my bourbon collection now that I am out of the camper and have space!
This blog is my attempt to marry my “hobbies”, if you will. I also plan to write about my adventures as I travel around the world to meet and enable Zscaler’s brilliant technical sales folks.
Please follow me on my socials. My Twitter feed (@chewievt) is generally a mixture of posts from Untappd and tweets about technology.
The Cloudy Beer 