Melissa Palmer, VCDX-236, is an information technology infrastructure enthusiast. She has held various roles such as Technical Marketing Engineer, Solutions Architect, Systems Engineer, and Infrastructure Analyst during her career.

Melissa has always had a passion for learning. She began taking technology courses at community college at the age of 14. She dropped out of high school after three years to attend college at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. At Stevens, Melissa earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical engineering. She went on to also earn a Master of Engineering Degree in Networked Information Systems focused on Secure Networked Systems Design.

During her time at Stevens, she was an infrastructure intern for an online bond trading firm on Wall Street. She began her career in the IT infrastructure organization of a pharmaceutical company working with a number of infrastructure technologies. She began working with Virtualization in 2007, which began her journey to becoming an IT architect. In 2012, she made the transition from customer to vendor.

Melissa is active in the IT infrastructure community. She is also the Creative Director of the Virtual Design Master program, which provides technology community members the opportunity to work on their IT architecture skills with the mentorship of IT architects. When Melissa isn’t working with technology, she enjoys going to rocket launches, cooking, and writing. More of her writing can be found on her own blog http://vmiss.net/. Follow her on Twitter @vmiss33