Aries Systems Corporation

Tell us a little about yourself – how long have you been working for Aries? What did you do before joining Aries?

I have been with Aries for a little over a year now. Before joining Aries, I worked as a Standard Query Language Database Administrator (SQL DBA) for a company based out of Arizona. I was there for about twelve years and worked remotely from home throughout my time there. It was a great opportunity to be at home while my kids were growing up, but now I welcome the face-to-face time I share with my co-workers at Aries!

What have your roles at Aries been?

I have been a Senior SQL Database Administrator since I started at Aries in early 2019.

How have your previous roles helped you in your current position?

I have mainly been a SQL DBA at the last few companies I’ve worked for, but have also worked closely with other departments in IT as well as developers, engineers, project managers, client services and the end-users. I think this helps me tie together all aspects of a business to be able to forecast and plan for the future in addition to daily troubleshooting.

How do you stay up-to-date with customer needs?

Since I don’t work directly with the customer, most of their needs are communicated by the Aries Client Services or through my manager.

Tell me about your department and the people you work most closely with.

I work in the Aries Operations department which is made up of the DBAs and IT. Since the Ops team is located in a secure section of the Aries office, we spend the majority of our time in our fishbowl looking out the windows wondering what the outside world is like and if there is any free food in the cafeteria (haha)! We have a good time working together and I love the comradery! When we aren’t heads-down getting our work done or discussing an issue we are trying to solve, we are listening to the best 80’s and 90’s rock songs and then razzing our teammate Ryan Balukas for being too young to know what we are talking about (haha). We have a lot of fun!

Describe your typical workday.

Is there such a thing? Since I started working at Aries, I have been working a lot on the Elsevier site builds for their migrations, but I also spend time creating new sites for customers, clones for other departments to work through issues, forecasting space needs, creating scripts among other projects. There isn’t really a typical day for me. There are similar tasks done each day, but there is always something new to work through and learn about which is great!

What do you most enjoy about your job?

The people! No doubt about it. At my last company, there were a few people that I worked with that made it a very stressful and painful job on a regular basis. Everyone at Aries is easy to work with. We can talk about work and what’s going on in our lives outside of the office. They have all been very welcoming to me over the last year!

What are you currently reading, listening to, or watching?

Reading? What’s that? (haha)! I don’t normally read any fiction. It’s always interesting but it puts me to sleep. If I am reading it’s some “how-to” book about home repairs and remodeling or something about personal finance.

Listening…if you ask my wife and kids, apparently, I don’t listen to anything. Normally, I only have music playing at work and in the car while driving. My playlists are all over the place. You will find me listening to anything from 80’s hairbands, 90’s punk rock, 2000’s pop, anything country, musical numbers and anything by Eminem. I just listen to anything that fits my mood or will change my mood to what I want it to be. I just love to bop my head to anything. Don’t ever ask me to recite the words from a song though because I have no idea.

Watching – Typically my wife and I will watch TV at night and that is usually any of the Chicago Fire\Med\PD shows, along with The Goldbergs or Modern Family. We will occasionally binge watch some shows together. Once she falls asleep, I’ll put on some action flick or anything post-apocalyptic.

Tell me about some of your hobbies/interests outside of work?

Sports, sports and more sports. Any given season we will have at least three different teams between our three girls, about 4-5 teams at any given time. My oldest plays soccer, my middle plays soccer and softball and my youngest plays soccer and basketball. I typically coach all of them also, so most of our nights are quick dinners before practices or games and then the weekends consist of 3-4 games each day. I LOVE it and they LOVE to play it!

When I’m not coaching or cheering on my girls, you will find me playing soccer, basketball, football or baseball. I love to stay active and competitive. We also do as much together as a family as possible. We go camping any time we don’t have sports going on and sometimes even when we do, especially for tournaments that are further away.

 I also like to do a lot of work around the house. I recently remodeled a few bathrooms and am currently doing a ton of landscaping around the house. Basically what I’m saying is that if I sit down on the couch at home, I will fall asleep in less than 30 seconds (haha!) I love to stay busy!