Well this is the first blog I’ve written about myself but I feel it’s time. Often times it shocks me to see how many people that I meet in the field at random places have used my website as a study resource for their CCNA Exam preparation rather it be the practice labs or the practice exams. It makes me happy knowing I’m making a difference in someone else’s life.

Just last month I sitting next to a guy at a conference in Boston named Daniel and as we were listening to a speaker and he was talking about how he just passed his CCNA on his second attempt. So I asked him what study materials he use and mentioned a few things such as the Official Cisco CCNA Certification Library by Cisco Press, CCNA CBT Nuggets and a few others. Than he mentioned Free CCNA Workbook and I was shocked. I was like “really?, I’ve heard great things about that website” He went on talking about the site a little bit while showing me the website on his iPad and I was completely speechless. Than I finally told him that I’m the Founder of Free CCNA Workbook.

He looked at me all funny like I was full of horse shit and said no way!! I was trying not to laugh while pointing to my name tag and saying “Yes way! I’m Matthew George, I founded the website back in 2009. None the less he was really shocked and said he loves the site and asked me if I had plans to build more than I told him of my plans to release the new CCNA Workbooks in the coming year which include the CCNA Security, CCNA Voice and CCNA Wireless.

Sometimes I get a kick out of knowing that random people I meet at tech conferences use the very workbook(s) that I’ve written. It amazes me how fast free educational content spreads by word of mouth. Now that I think back when I was a CCNA candidate I would have loved to have had a workbook like this but at the time but no such resources were available and I ended up spending hundreds of dollars on training materials.

I guess I’ll talk a little bit about my History since that is the point of this little blog. I’m from good owe’ Kentucky, USA. Bourbon County to be precise which is the birthplace of Bourbon Whiskey. I got into technology at an extremely young age. Not many 7 year old’s were building nt4 web servers i believe. I remember the rise of Yahoo and the fall of Netscape Navigator, I watched E-Bay and Google rise to power and watched the dot com bubble bust. Sadly, I miss the 90’s as they were most influential times of my life but as I have learned, life goes on.

I’ve done work for several large companies including ACS, Xerox, Lexmark, Chase Bank, University of Kentucky, University of Massachusetts and I’m currently working at a Co-location Company that has multiple data centers in the New England region.

Originally when I got into the IT field, I was a desktop support geek than that slowly evolved into a systems administrator where I was managing Active Directory, file servers, web servers and the whole nine yards. In 2006 I got bored of doing systems administration and finally made my move into the networking field and I’ve been here ever since. Obtained the CCNA at 18, CCNP at 19 and soon to be CCIE Routing and Switching with the Lab exam scheduled for 12-12-12.

I personally love what I do and I enjoy waking up every knowing that I get to work on new and exciting technologies, or as i like to put it new and exciting big boy toys that cost millions of dollars…

Well I guess that just about sums up this post. If you’d like to chat send me a message on irc.freenode.net in #Cisco my nick is mgeorge or if you have any questions feel free to post on the forums.