It’s 9:30 on a Saturday evening. I’m standing behind the front-of-house console at Family Church Van Alstyne — a church plant that didn’t exist the last time I published here — and I’ve just finished setting the room for tomorrow morning’s rehearsal and worship services. Stage box patched, every instrument cable run and labeled, keyboard up, mics placed, personal mixers configured, pedalboard staged, laptop ready for backing tracks, ProPresenter loaded. I’ve got a gate open on the pastor’s monitor, a channel strip pulled up on the iPad, and then my phone buzzes: a security alert from work, weekend maintenance window gone sideways, one of those things that needs a three-sentence reply and then a mental shelf until Monday.
Two hats, one moment. This is pretty much always what it looks like.
I started Wired Christianity back when enterprise Wi-Fi was still an argument and “cloud” meant somebody else’s server farm that you were vaguely suspicious of. The tagline — Christianity in a wired world, as viewed by a Christian geek — was my honest attempt to write from the place where I actually live, which is somewhere at the intersection of fiber runs and Scripture, late-night incident response and early-morning prayer. The old blog had its moments. If you ever read the 2011 post “IPv6 and Biblical Prophecy”, you have some sense of what I mean when I say I like taking the long road between two apparently unrelated ideas. (That one’s getting a proper revisit in Post #5 of this new run — because as it turns out, the address-space question looks a little different when you’re living inside the IPv6 era for real.)
Then life happened, at volume.
What the Quiet Stretch Looked Like
I’m not going to write an apology for the gap. Blogs go quiet. Mine did.
What filled the years: a pandemic that stress-tested every assumption the enterprise IT industry ever made about remote access, resilience, and what “critical infrastructure” actually means. A role that grew into managing network engineering for a large law firm, Baker Botts LLP, where the throughput problems are real and the tolerance for downtime is roughly zero. An ongoing commission in the Texas State Guard — Army Civil Affairs, 1st Brigade, currently serving as a G-5 NCO — which is its own education in what leadership looks like when the org chart is flat, the resources are thin, and the mission is non-negotiable. A church plant in a fast-growing North Texas exurb that needed audio, AV, logistics, and a few thousand volunteer hours nobody was counting. And, last summer, the loss of my dad.
I kept shipping. I just wasn’t writing about it.
Why Now, and What’s Different
The short answer is that 2026 is a genuinely interesting moment to put words on a screen about tech and faith, and I am tired of watching both communities do lazy thinking about each other’s domain.
The longer answer involves some specific changes in the landscape:
The industry I work in has consolidated dramatically. SD-WAN absorbed into SASE. Zero Trust went from a Forrester whitepaper to a procurement checkbox to — finally — something that actually resembles a normative architecture in shops that are doing it right. AI coding assistants have rewritten the software development lifecycle in ways that haven’t fully surfaced yet, but every infrastructure engineer I know is already feeling the downstream effects on change velocity. These are not hype-cycle observations. They are things happening in production environments right now, including mine.
Meanwhile, the faith conversation online has gotten louder and, I’d argue, shallower. There is no shortage of Christian content. There is a real shortage of content from people who are doing the work — in the pews, in the data center, in the field — and writing honestly from that position without trying to sell you something or tell you what to think.
That’s the lane I want to occupy.
What to Expect
The cadence is biweekly, published Mondays. First year’s topics will move across AI, cloud, network security, leadership, ministry, and the veteran experience. Not in separate silos — the whole point is that these things talk to each other in ways that aren’t obvious until someone who lives across all of them sits down and draws the connections. Microsegmentation may be the rule in modern network and security architectures, but it isn’t an option in real life — every domain of a working person’s day contends for the same bandwidth, processing, and storage. (That feels like its own post for another Monday.)
Every post will aim for practitioner content — actual configurations, actual lessons learned, actual theology that holds up when things go sideways at 2am. There will also be room for honest opinions on directional shifts and emerging tech, because pretending I don’t have any would be its own kind of dishonesty. If a post doesn’t have something you can use or something that reframes how you see a problem, I’ll consider it a failure.
Voice will stay what it’s always been: plain, direct, occasionally stubborn. Lightly self-deprecating when warranted, which is often.
A Few Housekeeping Notes
If you want professional context on the day-job side of things, my professional site has the full background. If you want to reach me — a question, a pushback, a topic suggestion — use the contact page. There’s also a subscribe option there if you’d rather have posts land in email than go looking for them.
I am glad to be back. Not in an “I’m back!” way — more in the way that you’re glad to pick up a tool you know how to use.
Let’s get to work.
Unworthy, but His, —Nick
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”
— Colossians 3:23–24 (ESV)