Greetings. I'm, Robert Mathis, the CEO of Jack Stone Industries and I am proud to introduce you to my personal blend of art and technolgy. My beginning roots in technology started with a small side business years ago performing basic IT services for homes and small businesses. Later, when I worked at Stepp Services, Inc. an opportunity arose to build out the companies first website. Eagerly taking the reigns I created their first website using basekit, a website builder like Weebly or Wix. I was unsatisfied with the final product and quickly picked up a book on building websites by hand. From that time forward I learned and created everything from simple html pages to complex asyncronous calls with jQuery, PHP, and mySQL.

While still at Stepp Services I built my first small ecommerce site to win the business of a potential client I was faced for the first time with need to secure what I had created. This introduced me to cybersecurity although this would not fully take hold until a later date. Shortly after winning the client I took another position with a prestigious college. It was in the first six months there that my studies in Linux, specifically Gentoo, took off due to the mentoring of Dr. Phil Smith. While I could with relish go into the gritty, exciting details, it will suffice to say with the completion of my master project (full Gentoo build on a laptop with PHP7,mySQL5.4, and Apache2 set up) I was ready for my next challenge.

In my second year a friend proposed Western Governors University to me. After having applied for, won, and completed Cisco's CCNA Cyber Ops program quickly (200+ hours of study, 3rd out of a cohort of 1500 people) in addition to the CompTIA Security+ a mere 14 days later while completing two classes at Wake Tech Community College with A's, the idea of a competency based program deeply interested me. I selected the Cybersecurity and Information Assurance program which I finished within 1 years time.

Now I'm here for my next challenge. My philosophy is for things/people to be better than what they are. Be better. I recognize that perfection is impossible, but consistent endeavors to be better is not. In keeping with Agile I provide a product, then work to improve the product, no matter what it is. Each evolution is better than the last. When dealing with custom work this is important. Really, its critical. Because when hammer meets anvil and the sparks start flying its the retooling that makes the product unique. Whether its new tools, technique, or a new product, evolution is necessary. Lets get started.