2012–2017 — Pre-Sovereign Era

The technology known today as Opplet originally emerged to support hands-on training for a career-transition community in Northern Virginia called the Career Network Ministry (CNM) and its partnering meetup group, which later became CNMCyber. Local Microsoft stores were often used as training venues. Gary has been with the project since those first sessions.

In 2012–2013, the logistics were mostly manual: if training went beyond office suites, participants were required to arrive at practical sessions with the necessary software already installed on their own machines. Practical time meant for the tools went to fixing mismatched installations instead.

To standardize the environment, the training programs in 2014 transitioned to a year-long partnership with Microsoft Corporation. While this provided a unified platform of enterprise-level tools, the work ran entirely on borrowed footing. Proprietary software and temporary licenses left the effort structurally exposed. Within a year, every subscription that lapsed and every platform that altered its terms demonstrated that relying on infrastructure owned by other companies was simply a dependency waiting to fail.

The drive to secure a long-term technology partner and put this purposeful practice on an independent footing led to the formation of the Virginia Institute of Technology (VIT), with a partner in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. The focus remained squarely on applied skills, now delivered via remote access to virtual machines.

In late 2016, that partnership ended in a technical catastrophe. The main Proxmox server hosting the environment failed, and the backups proved unrecoverable. The overwhelming majority of developed materials vanished instantly.

Among the losses was a nearly finished course, English as a Programming Language. At the time, many participants — especially parents of school-age children — wanted to learn programming but stalled on where to start. CNMCyber typically opened with HTML and CSS, which gave some coding experience without being programming languages per se, then moved on to JavaScript and PHP; many participants got lost in that transition. The course took a different route: start with the language participants already knew — English — and treat it as code, learning to read and reason about it with the precision you’d bring to programming. It was an idea ahead of its time, and the later arrival of large language models validated the instinct. After the crash, only fragments survived, pulled back from the Internet Archive.

Nevertheless, the experience with virtualization was instrumental. During that time, the team began using virtual machines for full immersion. The fast servers could accommodate applications, such as Android Studio, that no regular laptop could run. By the end of this period, Natalia, from Ukraine, had emerged as the project’s principal technologist. Those developments were later carried forward into the 2017–2020 work.