Schenectady, New York  ·  Security+  ·  A+

Jason Gibson
AV & IT

Give me a system I have never seen and I will find where it breaks. A patch bay routes audio, a reverse proxy routes requests — the thinking is the same, and I taught myself both by doing them.

What I do

Rooms that work when the meeting starts

I install, configure and troubleshoot AV and IT systems — Crestron and Extron control, Zoom and Teams rooms, networks, imaging and Active Directory.

At SUNY Schenectady that meant 80 large events a year and a thousand tickets, on a campus of five thousand people. At Domino's it meant AV, sensors and thin clients across restaurants, where downtime is measured in orders lost.

1,000Tickets / year
+15%Over SLA
80+Events / year
5,000Users supported

Also: a 10% cut in A/V spend at SUNY, by specifying equipment that did the job instead of equipment that looked like it would.

Proof, not a course certificate

A production environment I run myself

112 containers across two machines, at home, in daily use by my family. Single sign-on, reverse proxy and TLS, centralised logging, intrusion detection, offsite backup, and a private model gateway.

It is not a lab that sits idle. Things break in it and I fix them, which is the part a certificate cannot show: a database that filled a disk and took a photo service down with it, a nightly backup that had been copying a NAS onto the wrong drive for a week, a service that restarted a thousand times because it mistook its own slowness for somebody else's.

Single sign-on

One account across every application in the house, with per-person access and sessions that end when access is removed.

Observability

Metrics, logs and uptime checks on a second machine, so the box that is down is not the box being asked whether it is down.

Applications

A phone assistant, a photo library with automatic tagging, a garden catalogue, and a telephone line that answers and plays a recording.

Security, practised not just studied

74 rooms and a report to show for it

Top 7% on TryHackMe — 74 completed rooms across offensive and defensive tracks, from the Cyber Kill Chain and the Pyramid of Pain through to digital forensics and SOC operations.

It is the deliberate half of the same habit as the homelab: break something in a place where breaking it is the point, then write down how.

Offensive: SQL injection, command injection, file inclusion, SSRF, XSS, IDOR, authentication bypass, subdomain enumeration, Metasploit, Burp Suite, Linux and Windows privilege escalation.
Defensive: SOC operations, digital forensics, threat intelligence, the Cyber Kill Chain, the Unified Kill Chain, the Pyramid of Pain, the Diamond Model.
Foundations: networking to the packet, the OSI model, DNS, HTTP, Linux and Windows internals, PowerShell and Python for testers.

74Rooms done
7%Top rank
10Badges

Coursework at Saint Rose included a full ethical-hacking report on the OverTheWire Bandit wargame — scope, intelligence gathering, threat model, vulnerability analysis, exploitation, post-exploitation and findings, written the way an engagement is actually documented.

The other desk

DJ and live sound

I DJ. Which is the same job as the rest of this page, with an audience watching.

Signal flow, gain staging, a room's acoustics, and knowing what to do in the four seconds after something cuts out — that is AV work, and doing it live is the version with no second take. It is why I am comfortable in a control booth during an event rather than only before one.

Equipment I work with: Crestron and Extron control and switching, Zoom and Teams room systems, DSP and mixing, projection and displays, cable infrastructure and the patching that keeps it serviceable.

I also stream my own sets from a server I run — Traktor into OBS, RTMP into Owncast on the LAN, HLS back out through the same reverse proxy as everything else here.

Nights I have played The live stream

How I work

Nobody taught me any of this

Every system on this page I built by reading, trying it, breaking it and fixing it. No bootcamp, no team to fall back on, no one to hand it to when it got hard.

That is the part worth hiring. Certificates say I passed an exam. What I actually do is take a scope I have not seen before and keep going until it works — then write down what went wrong so the next person does not lose the same afternoon.

I have ADHD. It changed how I learn, not how much: I go all the way into a problem and I do not come out until it is solved. Seventy-four rooms, a hundred and twelve containers and a fault chased through three layers are all the same trait doing the same thing. Most employers treat it as a risk. It is the reason any of this exists.

A fault I chased recently: a photo service kept dying every eight minutes. The alerts said the container was restarting. The container was a symptom — a nightly backup had been copying a network drive onto the local disk for a week, the disk filled, the database could not write, and the service restarted forever. The backup had a guard against exactly this, written a fortnight earlier, which never ran because it was installed to a path nothing executes.

Three layers between the alert and the cause. That is the work.

Experience

Where I have done it

Lead AV & IT Technician — Domino's Inc

Jul 2024 – Feb 2025 · New York area
  • Installed and configured AV systems, temperature sensors and thin clients across restaurant sites.
  • Troubleshot AV and network faults on franchise-specific equipment, keeping stores trading.
  • Preventative maintenance and cable management standards, so the next fault was quicker to find.

Senior IT / Lead AV Technician — SUNY Schenectady

Sep 2021 – Dec 2023 · Schenectady, New York
  • Led the team through 1,000+ support requests a year in Remedyforce, beating SLA by 15%.
  • Ran Crestron and Extron systems for 80+ large virtual events a year on Zoom and Teams.
  • Built user onboarding with Active Directory and imaging, and improved network efficiency for 5,000+ users.
  • Cut A/V spend 10% while improving production quality.
Education

Qualifications

MS Cyber Security — University at Albany (in progress)
BS Cyber Security — The College of Saint Rose

CompTIA Security+ and A+, both current to 2027. Cloud+ expected 2026.

Next step

Let's talk

Open to AV, IT and security work — on site in the Capital Region, or remote. The resume is a page; this site is the evidence behind it, and everything on it I built myself.