The short version
I’m Don Peek — Air Force cryptologist turned avionics engineer turned programmer turned web hosting guy, and somewhere along the way I became “Dr. D.” I run Coastland Technologies, a web hosting company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and when I’m not keeping servers alive I fly RC airplanes — badly enough to be entertaining, well enough to keep coming back.
How I got here
In high school I was the kid who loved science and space and never needed a study hall. In 1972 I found a program that let me attend DeKalb College during my senior year of high school, and a “Radio and TV” class got me hooked on electronics. TV repair paid the bills, but TV repair customers were not my calling.
So I joined the Air Force to see the world. The world turned out to be Texas — Lackland AFB to Kelly AFB — where I specialized in cryptology. Great training in electronics, terrible for the resume: it’s hard to get hired for work on equipment you can’t talk about.
After the service I finished an electronics degree on the GI Bill, then went to work for Sperry Flight Systems in Arizona on 747 and 767 landing electronics, and later in Los Angeles on L-1011 systems. A few years of LA was enough — a trip home reminded me who I was, and I came back south to work for Loral Display Systems near Atlanta, designing aircraft display systems and security test software.
Then came an offer for temporary work in Charleston. I pictured beaches and ocean — Charleston, South Carolina. It was Charleston, Tennessee. I stayed anyway.
In the 90s I moved into programming and systems analysis, earned a B.S. in Computer Science, and spent about a decade at Olin Chemicals — hired by the engineering team as their programmer, which got me into everything from cost systems to a national SQL call-center database to emergency response systems. That’s also where Butch Carman, a senior engineer, nicknamed me “Dr. D” — my office was in the hallway with all the engineering PhDs, and they hung out in mine as much as their own. Dr. Don got shortened. It stuck.
Coastland Technologies
In 1999 I started Coastland Technologies, my own web hosting company, running LAMP servers out of a Chattanooga data center. Twenty-five-plus years later, I’m still at it — around 150 customers, many of whom have been with me for over two decades. I do the hosting, the server wrangling, and the web development myself: Joomla and WordPress builds, migrations, malware cleanups, the unglamorous work that keeps small businesses online.
Ask anyone who’s been a customer for twenty years why they stay, and it’s not the control panel. It’s that when something breaks at 2 AM, I answer.
The flying bug
My other life is RC airplanes — specifically 3D aerobatics, the kind of flying where the airplane spends half its time hanging off the propeller doing things full-scale pilots would get fired for. I run Southern 3D, “the home of extreme 3D flying,” and I spend a good chunk of every year at fly-ins: Joe Nall Week and Nall in the Fall at Triple Tree Aerodrome in South Carolina, the McMinnville fun-flies, 3D night jams. My dog Heidi comes along — she’s a regular at the flight line and probably better known than I am.
There’s a straight line from cryptology to avionics to servers to RC airplanes, by the way. It’s all electronics, and none of it ever really leaves you.
