About Shelby DeNike

Headshot of Shelby DeNike

Let’s see, I was born Thursday, August 7th, 1980, at 2:17 pm in good old Lansing, Michigan. Over the years, I grew up doing this and did that; somewhere along the way, I took a liking to computers and excelled at it, from the BBS days on a 1200 baud modem to working in multiple data centers with multiple provider connections coming in.

After spending 24 winters in that cold, gloomy state, I decided it was time for a change to experience what lies outside of Michigan, so in July of 2005; I decided to move to sunny California to see what it could bring me in life.  I worked for an outdoor lighting company as their Director of Media Technology (Pretty much a fancy title for saying I edited photos, managed a blog, and helped the owner send emails).  I moved from that to working at another Web Hosting company.

After spending a few years in Los Angeles, I moved to Las Vegas for a year, and after a very hot summer in Las Vegas, I decided to move back to Los Angeles again.  That time around, it was short-lived, and I found myself back in Las Vegas dealing with the extreme heat. After a couple of years of being back in Las Vegas in 2013, I decided it was time to make another move, this time to the mountains of Colorado.  I chose Boulder, Colorado, which was an amazing change from Vegas. After being in Boulder I did a short stint living in downtown Denver right off Colfax which was a great location and a lot more walkable than I expected.  After a visit back to Michigan for a friend’s funeral and meeting up with a girl I had a crush on throughout most of school, I decided that, after being away for 12yrs, to move back to my hometown of Okemos, Michigan.  On January 20th, 2017, I hit the road and made that same drive I made in 2005 when I started my journey out West.

Before moving to Colorado, I started working with Laughing Squid Hosting as a system administrator, which allowed for the move, and I started my own business (sd3labs, LLC, now defunct).  After 5yrs with Laughing Squid Hosting, I decided to move on and take a job with Pressed.net, a White-Label Fully Managed WordPress Hosting company, which Envato eventually acquired, where I was added to their Hosting Support team. I spent most of my days handling escalations, reviewing and onboarding themes for the now-defunct hosted platform, and creating various internal scripts to help the team.

Once Envato decided to close our department, I took some time to work on some personal side projects and random contract work; that was until I was approached by Kinsta and eventually moved up the ranks to be their sole Sales Engineer, a role that I never thought I would like but so far has been one of the most fulfilling ones ever. It was a great 4yr run until Kinsta switched gears and I was let go, strangely just happened to be the same time that just about every other internet company went through mass lay-offs too.

As of July 2023, I have found myself getting back to my roots of being a systems administrator; and was offered a job with UTAC located in Northville, Michigan. It is nice being back in the office after all these years working entirely remote, granted it is a Hybrid role so I do find myself in my home office a few days of the week.

About the Site

In my many years on the net, I have had many sites, Filthcentral.net, Systm.io, ShelbyDenike.com, SystmWeb.com, 7pounds.net, RubberOlives.com, Minify.us, Pict.mobi, Createmy.pw, VidThumb.com, TechFaqs.net, 878Studios.com, etc. I decided that I wanted a place to express myself and also play with web technologies, so I purchased Fauxzen.com. I have been running the site with this domain since Feb 2004 and will likely continue to renew it every year, though I did end up switching over to using DeNike.io instead. Fauxzen uses WordPress, and a slew of plug-ins to make it function how I see fit, and of course, it is currently running on my own Droplet over at Digital Ocean.

Facts: Updated 05.22.2023

  • I can cook well… on a grill, ask me to bake a cake, and I will fail. I have recently branched out into making some excellent homemade pizza, egg rolls, and various other dishes with my fancy cooking gear that I acquire much too often. I even started creating pickles I hope to sell at the local farmers’ market.
  • I was pretty sheltered when it came to food, being raised on the all-American meal of Burgers, Pizza, and Meat Loaf, but over the years, I have branched out and will usually give just about anything a try. On a trip to Australia, I even had some Kangaroo!
  • I mainly use Twitter, but recently have been using Mastodon Bluesky. I scroll through Instagram more often than I should. But I don’t use Facebook much these days; I feel it is slowly going the way of MySpace.
  • I have given up on Gentoo; now, I use Ubuntu on all of my Linux Machinesā€¦ and by all my Linux machines I mainly mean my home server and web server these days.
  • I tried the vegetarian route for a month once and may try it again sometime in the futureā€¦ but not anytime soon as it was so boring.
  • If I start a movie I will watch it no matter how bad.  Unless it is Journey to the Center of the Earth, that movie is absolute garbage; I did start and finish it in December of 2022, and I still am not impressed, though better than I originally thought.
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