For hire

Source

For more than 3 years now I've been looking for a new job. In fact, right now I'm unemployed, so now this search is my job. But I don't want any job, I have time to chose, at least for now,

Who I am and what can I do

I call myself a Systems Developer and Administrator. This 'title' more or less reflects what I like to do and what I have done.

With Systems Developer I mean that I like developing middle-to-low-level stuff. A few jobs ago, for instance, was (initially) to help an in-memory database to scale from a few gigabytes to a couple of terabytes. Have in mind that when I say scale I'm not entirely referring to what currently is known as scale; the data sharding was static, so I would not call that a Distributed System. I also helped implementing a couple of optimizations to the storage and search algorithms, and hunting down performance problems.

It also means that I want to stay away from frontend development of any kind. This is because I'm not good at doing UI, and I prefer not to use quirky languages like PHP or JavaScript. But then, I have done it, even for one of my projects.

I hope the Systems Administrator part is not a problem for you. This was the first type of job I had and I love it. I've been the single IT guy in various organizations and also worked in a team for a big company. My current interests on this side are:

  • Learning more tools: I have experience with configuration management systems, but I want more, and no cloud experience.
  • Automation: I hate doing anything twice, so automation is what I do. I use shell scripts, makefiles, whatever is better for the problem. I'm also interested in having a better language than Bash for that. Perl is an option, but I would like to use Python for that. See ayrton.
  • Documentation: My experience with CMSs is that they produce your infrastructure, but they don document it. I've been playing with Puppet, graphviz and ruby-doc to try and fix that.

Who are you (and who are you not)

I have my strong opinion on several subjects. This impacts on the kind of company I'm willing to work for. It should not be involved in marketing, spam, bitcoin, stock market, real time bidding, IoT, health system or education if your market is USA.

You also have a high score in Joel Spolsky's «12 steps for better code», even if it's more Probably not as strict as 11 or better, I can do with 10 or 9. Also, the article is quite outdated in the tools it mentions (it's 15 years old and counting!); instead of CVS, I require Bazaar, Mercurial or git or anything of that level.

What work you offer me

My skills also limit the kind of works I can do. I am a Systems Developer and Administrator. I have good background on operating systems, networking and distributed systems. I'm somewhat obsessive about understanding the systems I'm working with and pursuing bugs, sometimes down endless rabbit holes. Because of that, my platform of choice is Linux: is one of the few that allows you to see the code underneath the hood (yes, yes, I know, some of you hate the car metaphor).

As a developer I have a set of preferred tools: Python is my main development language, but I have done C, C++ and Java. I wrote some experimental go, and I can do Ruby; maybe Haskell or some Lisp/Scheme. Javascript... I'm not so sure. I will definitely not do PHP.

I have several interests. One is automation. I'm even playing with the idea of making Python a better language for shell scripting. This toy even has semi-transparent remote execution of code.

I have several interests in technology and IT:

  • Operating systems, Networks and Distributed systems: I even made a prototype of a Distributed File System as the final project for my degree.
  • Building and maintaining infrastructure: I have been a SysAdmin for years, in places of an increasing size.
  • Working for developers: I like working for users (from a SysAdmin point of view) and I find developers the best kind of users, because the know what they want and are open to discuss the impact of what they're asking. Also, as a developer, I know about their problems and frustrations, and how demanding they can be :)
  • Free software and its communities: This has been a great part of my life in the last 18 years.

This job taps in the last four items of that list, and that's a big score. I think it will also push me further into big deployments, which is the closer that I can get to the first item.

  • SRE *