Bio

About

I’m Dennis Hollarn II.

Sixty years old. Erie, Pennsylvania. Penn State MIS, Cum Laude, 1992. Three decades in networking, from token ring to AI. Asked Bill Gates a question in 1995 that ended up as evidence in the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust case. Now I’m building this site to pass on what I’ve learned to my three adult children, my niece, my nephews, and anyone else navigating the exponential age.

None of what follows would exist without my wonderful ex-wife. Her common sense and her motherly love toward our three children is the reason they turned out so grounded and successful. Whatever I’ve built, I built standing on what she gave us.

The thread that runs through everything

In October 1995 — three years out of Penn State, running the network at a small Pennsylvania company called Advacom — I asked Bill Gates how long we’d continue replacing human work with technology. He answered. Seventeen newspapers across five countries on four continents ran the exchange. The U.S. Department of Justice entered it as Exhibit 333 in the antitrust case against Microsoft.

I’ve been thinking about that question for thirty years. This site is the long answer.

Read the full story →

Education and the path not taken

B.S. Management Information Systems, Cum Laude — Penn State University, 1992.

My professor and mentor was Jeffrey Kushner, PhD — a Bell Labs researcher who taught C++ and went on to work on the Human Genome Project. He pushed me toward Carnegie Mellon’s dual PhD program: neural networking on the technical side, neuroscience on the medical side. This was 1992. The neural-networks work would have put me at the intersection of computer science and brain science about thirty years before everyone else got there.

I chose a different path. Twenty years later he reconnected with me and said, “It’s not too late.”

Thirty years in networking

1992–1994 · Gannon University & Technology Specialists — Erie, PA

Network Services Manager. Maintained Gannon’s 2,500-node GTE OMNI CBX phone system. Designed cable plant, LAN topology, and data/voice hardware specifications. Installed the university’s first Internet presence with PrepNet.

1994–1999 · Advacom, Inc. — McKean, PA

Network Manager. Built and ran a 200-node Ethernet LAN and 20-site WAN over Frame Relay and point-to-point links — HP-UX, NT 4.0 Server, NT Terminal Server, Citrix 4.0 over TCP/IP. Built the company’s first Internet presence, web server, and firewall (Raptor EagleNT 6.0, application-level).

This is where the Bill Gates question came from. The address that ran in seventeen newspapers — dhollarn@advacom.com — was my work email at Advacom.

1999–2015 · Erie Insurance — Erie, PA

Fifteen years at one of the largest insurance companies in Pennsylvania, with a brief stint at Adelphia Business Solutions (2000–2001) as Regional Network Engineer providing tier 3/4 support to the High-Speed Data department.

  • Telecommunications/Network Analyst (1999–2000) — 16 Mb/s token ring environment
  • Network Services Supervisor (2001–2003) — supervised three analysts during the multi-million-dollar migration from Nortel token-ring to Cisco multilayer Ethernet
  • Sr. Network Analyst (2003–2015) — primary network and systems administration in an isolated computing environment. Built ERIE’s first Catastrophe Response Unit (CRU) data/voice design. Built ERIE’s first redundant SONET ring and Internet multi-homed gateway. Evaluated Riverbed/Opnet APM tools against the competitive field. Applied Kepner-Tregoe structured problem analysis (SA/PA/DA/PPO) to critical infrastructure issues.

2015–2019 · Senior technical roles

  • Sr. Network Technician at V.S. (2015–2017) — network, desktop, video, security, and phone system installations
  • Data Comm Engineer at UPMC Hamot (2017–2018) — Cisco 3850 VOIP switching deployment across campus, Cisco APIC/Prime provisioning
  • Network Specialist at Cummins (2018–2019) — Cisco switching and routing engineering, Visio network documentation, Fluke test-equipment troubleshooting

2019–Present · UPMC — Sr. Health Care Concierge

Working with Medicare members to resolve insurance issues — benefits, claims, appointments, bill pay. While I’m here:

  • Designed an information retrieval system used company-wide — applied AI thinking before the AI boom went mainstream
  • Built a voice-to-text solution to streamline operations — wrote an internal training paper teaching colleagues to use voice-to-text well. Jensen Huang at NVIDIA now describes voice as the future of human-computer interaction. I’d been teaching it for years.

People I’ve been privileged to learn from

Dinner with Stuart Biggs, CCIE #1025 — At an Opnet conference in Washington, D.C., during my time at Erie Insurance, I had dinner with Stuart Biggs. Stuart wasn’t just an early CCIE — he was the first. He led the team that created the entire CCIE certification program at Cisco. He received CCIE #1025 on July 19, 1993 (the lab itself got #1024 as a plaque — 2^10). He developed Cisco’s first company website. He passed away in 2013 at age 53. To have spent an evening with the man who literally built the foundation of modern enterprise networking certification is something I think about often when I’m watching what’s coming next.

Quoted in Network World, May 2009 — Industry analysts Jim Metzler (Ph.D., Boston University) and Steve Taylor quoted me at length in their column The Siloed Vendor Offerings, identifying me as “Dennis Hollarn II, a Senior Network Analyst at Erie Insurance.” My observation about silos in IT vendor offerings prompted them to dedicate two follow-up newsletters to topics I raised — including cloud computing, which I was already flagging as a potential solution. Read the article →

Between Kushner steering me toward Carnegie Mellon’s neural networks program in 1992, dinner with the architect of CCIE in person, and being quoted by industry analysts — I’ve been close to the people building this future for a long time. This site is where I share what they’ve taught me with the people who don’t have that kind of access.

What I’m doing now

  • Building this website (with help from Claude / Anthropic)
  • Recently completed: Tony Robbins AI Advantage Boot Camp
  • In progress: Anthropic / Claude certifications
  • Watching the AI revolution carefully and translating it for people in my life who don’t have time to follow it themselves

Skills & training

Router / Switch / Firewall configuration · TCP/IP packet analysis · Kepner-Tregoe structured problem analysis · Network engineering and architecture · Supervisory and project management · Complex troubleshooting.

Trained in ITIL, VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, EMC Smarts, HP OpenView, Secure Computing IronMail, Opnet. Certified in Dale Carnegie and Franklin-Covey.

Connect

— Dennis Hollarn II
Erie, Pennsylvania
June 2026