Hello and welcome to PeteCahill.com, my personal website.  I’m Pete Cahill, an IT enterprise services leader by profession, and a lifelong vintage technology tinkerer and amateur musician by obsession.  I’m a husband and a father and am prone to making obscure pop culture references that fewer people “get” as the years go by.

I created this site back in 2000 during the height of the dot-com boom, not for business, but for sharing my interests with family and friends in a time that pre-dates the social media world.  If you count yourself among those groups, then you know that this site is often neglected for long stretches while it competes for attention with my other interests.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My Origin Non-Story

I hail from Chicago, Illinois and was a child of the early 70’s and 80’s.  I’ve spent most of my life growing up and living in Las Vegas, Nevada, but lately you’ll find me in Phoenix, Arizona.  Despite those locales, I rarely gamble, and I haven’t played golf since I was young.  Not much of an “origin story”, admittedly.  Dig deeper and you’d still struggle to find much of me across the social media landscape, either.  Nevertheless, those links are below.  I was a shy kid and am still a private person, but the good news is that I inherited my father’s extroversion; I like to get to know and work with people.  I’ve worked fully remote for many years prior to the pandemic, but it doesn’t replace face-to-face, in-person interaction that I believe is an essential part of being human and part of a community (I’m looking at you, Gen Z).

A Very Particular Set of Skills?

I’ve enjoyed a thirty-five-year career defining, implementing, and supporting technology and IT infrastructure services to a few Fortune 500 companies in the wholesale distribution industry.  You’ll find my resume here.  I’ve always thrived on the challenge of doing so with limited resources (time, people, budget – you name it).  Way back in the early days of my career, it was thrilling to be “the guy” to turn an empty warehouse into a connected, operating business in a single weekend.  It fed the ego-demon.  But as I learned over time that the “superhero” approach wasn’t the right play for so many reasons, I unlocked a new passion for cultivating and leading technology teams to deliver those solutions to-scale.  I’ve had the good fortune of working with so many talented and highly intelligent people over the years, yet there’s always that goosebumps moment whenever I recognize that the team is operating in total synchrony.

Electronics and the Magic Smoke

I’ve been disassembling anything with a battery, blinking lights, or a power cord since I was six years old.  This often got me into trouble, and sometimes still does – avoid releasing the magic smoke!  I have an unshakeable curiosity for how things are made and how they work.  Explore the site some and you’ll see evidence of that fact abundantly scattered about.  I might also have a small problem saying “no” to vintage arcade games and computers.

How to Carry a Tune

One odd coincidence I discovered while working in a technical field is how many of my colleagues were also musicians.  I’ve been listening to, dissecting, playing, and writing music for nearly all my life.  My older sister might’ve gotten the organ lessons, but I caught the bug.  Yes, I first disassembled the organ to get an up-close look at the warm glow of all those vacuum tubes, but I also labeled all the keys with a marker and commandeered her lesson material.  This began a mostly self-taught journey that continues to this day.  As it is with many people, music has been a life companion that heals, inspires, brings joy and sometimes pain, and gives hope.  It’s also been at times a confounding puzzle and a mystery waiting to be solved.  I still work on it daily.

Socrates Wouldn’t Call It Philosophy

Eh, not really a philosophy, but there are a few core tenets that I apply to every day.  This is what works for me:

• • Be creative
  • Evaluate what you know and feel
  • Simplify wherever you can
  • Always learn something
  • Be grateful

I hope you enjoy the site, have a look around, and by all means reach out and contact me if the mood strikes you.  Thanks for stopping by.

Cheers!

Pete