About Tyler Duzan

My name is Tyler Duzan, or more formally Mr. Tyler T. Duzan.
My nickname is tristor. This site you're on, entitled Wandering in Wondering, is my personal website as part of the IndieWeb
If you need to contact me, please encrypt your messages using my public key.

I am many things, but perhaps most of all I am a life-long learner. I aspire to become a renaissance man, although I see the journey ahead as being long (and a whole lot of fun). My interests are fairly broad, and I tend to pick up new hobbies and interests often, delve deeply into them, and then file them away to make room for the next.

Travel has been curtailed significantly by changes in my life and by the events of 2020, so I will be writing more about cooking as a way to express my love for food and the food culture of all the wonderful places I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, as well as my interests in cars and motorsports. When I begin traveling again, I’ll of course continue writing about my travel experiences.

Topics I’m especially interested in and might even write about are: security and privacy, video games, graphics technology, headphones, stereo amplifiers, audio source components, home theater, and general computer hardware. Of course you may also see me write about topics which are related to the type of work that I do. I may also occasionally write about philosophy, current events, or politics, although this will be rare.

My own personal philosophy is relatively simple. I pretty much believe in “You do you.” As long as what someone does is not directly affecting me in a negative way, go for it. I try to also ensure that anything I do does not cause a negative effect on others. If you’re curious here’s my political compass:

Travel

I have been accepted into the Darién cohort for Remote Year leaving on June 1st, 2016. In short, I’m planning to do a lot of international travel soon. I’ve attempted a blog a few times before, but traveling this much has given me a great reason to write and share. I would not say I’m any sort of expert on travel, but I’ll share any of my experiences, tips and tricks, etc. along the way.

Product Manager

During my time at Rackspace (2010-2014), I started learning more about the Product side of tech, and got the opportunity to move into a Product Manager role at Percona (2017-2020), which landed me at Mozilla (2020-2022) working on Firefox, since then I’ve been at Cisco within ThousandEyes (2022-now). I’m still learning all the different facets of Product Management, but I bring to this a significant technical background, with an advanced understanding of security and cloud technologies, which helps me to form a strong rapport with the engineering teams I work with and advance business objectives rapidly through consensus-building. I may write some about my experiences as a Product Manager as I learn things I think are worth passing along.

DevOps Engineer

I first started using computers when I was a small child, with help from my father. I learned QBASIC on DOS, later started learning C, and fell in love with building computers out of parts and overclocking. This early exposure taught me how to deconstruct systems logically and helped me better understand both security implications and what the hidden effects of a design choice might be. I like to gain understanding about systems and software, but find that I do so better by deconstructing them than writing them. Perhaps because of this, I’ve found that while I am capable of doing so I don’t much care for writing software, although I do write software from time to time when necessary. Currently, if I do have to write software I most enjoy doing it using Google Golang

For more specific information about my professional background, feel free to click my resume link on the sidebar.

Photographer

My dad got me into photography when I was young. He was a pretty good wildlife photographer and often entered his photos into contests at the county fair, winning several blue ribbons in the process. He still has all of his old Minolta 35mm gear. These days I too primarily focus on wildlife and nature photography, although I’m a rank amateur at best. It’s a hobby I picked back up within the last couple of years during my extended stay in Colorado hiking in the mountains and drinking beer. It turns out there’s something almost meditative for me about photography. It also helps provide extra incentive to get out and hike which is great for my health.

These days I take a lot of photos but am very bad about handling post-processing. I don’t do a whole lot during post-processing, but I do shoot in RAW exclusively which means I have to at least color correct, lens correct, and crop. I have a pretty huge backlog I need to get through at all times, but am making an effort to be timely with photos while traveling to accompanying my writing here.

Gear:

  • Nikon D7200
  • (want) Nikon D750
  • Sony DSC-RX100 Mk V
  • Nikon 300mm f/4D IF-ED AF-S
  • Nikon 300mm f/4E PF ED AF-S VR
  • (want) Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/4E FL ED VR Lens
  • Nikon 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED AF-S VR
  • Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF
  • Nikon 28mm f/2.8D AF
  • (want) Nikon AF Fisheye-NIKKOR 16mm f/2.8D Lens
  • rMBP 15" mid-2015 DG
  • Adobe CC Photoshop
  • Adobe CC Lightroom
  • Photomatix Pro
  • Nik Collection

Beer

I would say I’m probably obsessed a bit with beer. I spent more than a year in Colorado for the primary purpose of trying a bunch of breweries (I visited more than 130 while there), and in the process learned how to home-brew and went to many beer festivals. That’s just a small fraction of the lengths I’ve went to in order to try new and interesting brews. I’ve tasted many thousands of beers from all over the world at this point, and I look forward to trying many more. Always happy to share a pint and have a conversation about beer.

Cooking

I’ve always loved food, but generally I was always eating out. 2020 changed that, forcing me to stay indoors for an extended period of time, which set me on a path to learn to cook. I’m still learning, but have advanced my skills considerably over the course of 2020 and onward, including taking six months of online culinary school. I’ve tried my hand at breadmaking, patisserie, roasting and braising of meats, grilling, frying, and have begun going further afield in my exploration of interesting flavor combinations. I’m taking a lot of my inspiration from traditional French/American cooking, but also from the flavors of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. As I’m cooking 6-10 times a week, now, I will likely be writing about this quite a lot in the coming days.

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