Mike Stankavich

A few days ago a recruiter told me that I’d be a great candidate, but when she looked at my resume she didn’t see where I had worked with Linux. That’s a good point, as most of my primary employment (what the rest of us call a day job 🙂 has been with Microsoft technologies. So that’s what stands out on my resume.

But I took a personal interest in Linux in the late 90s, and made it an integral part of my personal IT projects. And later, I took what I learned and used it for side consulting projects.

I started out with self-hosting my domains. I realized that a large portion of the internet ran on Linux and Unix. So I decided to learn more. I started out with building out web and email hosting on Red Hat. I used both servers that I built from parts I bought at Fry’s and Newegg, and virtual private servers from providers such as Linode.

As time went by, I started getting more and more spam from my domains. And since they were MY domains I didn’t want to change email addresses. So I taught myself how to build and tune SpamAssassin. There was a time where my SpamAssassin installs were 50-75% more effective than commercial hosting. Most providers have gotten much more serious about filtering by now, so it’s no longer worth the time and effort to do it myself.

I learned even more when I switched to using the Gentoo distribution for my servers. The Gentoo DIY, build from source ethos drives you to find out more about how things fit together.

When VPN started showing up in the corporate environment, I quickly saw the flexibility that offered so I dug into building my own. I built a number of routers for my home network and even a consulting client or two using embedded linux firewall distributions such as LEAF, Bering, IPCop, and Smoothwall. I ran my home network on these for several years along with OpenVPN for remote access.

The next frontier that I took on was storage. I had a number of computers around the house, and I wanted them backed up. I tried a number of storage server solutions. After playing with FreeNAS, Nexenta, and OpenFiler I ended up running an OpenFiler box for several years. The one downside was that I never found a totally seamless and automated client backup package. I ended up switching to Windows Home Server because it works in a very reliable and transparent fashion.

Around that time, I’d say 5 years or so ago, virtualization became a much larger part of the IT picture. I saw it showing up in a lot of places, and I thought it would be cool to have one big physical server that could run all the different things I had going on my home network.

I experimented with Xen Server, KVM, VMWare ESXi, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and more. Unfortunately all of them seemed to have a lot of IO overhead at that time, so I was disappointed with the performance, particularly for client backups. I ran ESXi and Hyper-V for a while, then later went back to a standalone WHS server and an Ubuntu server.

When I became an expat I gave up my elaborate home network. Now I just use a Synology NAS unit for file sharing and that’s it. Which runs embedded linux. So if need be I can open up an SSH connection and log in.

And as it turns out, I did work with Linux and Solaris during the day a few times too. I worked on a C application on Red Hat to enable bill of materials upload for Intel a few years back. And the Oracle servers that I worked with at Deutsche Bank ran on Solaris. I did some systems maintenance and some text file imports while I was there.

Over the years, I have also taken on a number of side consulting projects. A number of those have involved Linux, PHP, MySQL, and Postgres. I migrated a customer’s website from ASP.NET and SQL Server on Windows to PHP and MySQL, worked with a team of Python/Django developers to migrate a Cold Fusion and SQL Server app to PostGres, and I’m currently working on migrating an IBM/Rocket U2 ERP database running on Unixware (I’d say “ugh”, but SCO would probably sue me!) to SQL Server.

One more factor has driven my experience with the *nix platform. In 2011, I started another side business to develop mobile applications for the app store and sell mobile development services. While I’m no longer directly involved in that business, being involved with building iPhone apps drove me to switch from a Windows notebook (I was a longtime Thinkpad user) to a Macbook. I’ve found that I really like having the bash shell terminal prompt close by. I’ve installed Python, Django, Postgres, MySQL, Apache, Ruby, Rails, and more on my Mac to support various explorations.

So yes, I’m both comfortable and competent in Linux. Not an uber-nerd or kernel contributor, but I can definitely get around and get things done.

I tried to think of a clever excuse for not blogging for over two years. But the fact that there really is no excuse kind of overwhelms any minor cleverness I might devise. So I’ll just say that I’ve been on a REEEEALLLLYYYY long coffee break. Or something.  I don’t know.  Does it matter?

So, what of the last three years?  Expat life has been good. Lots of travel, lots of learning, and a bit of self discovery. In many ways I’d like to keep it going. But family ties and professional development interests are leading back to the US at least for now. I’ll miss SE Asia. I do hope to spend more time in this part of the world. Our time here taught us that we can live with much less than we had when we lived in the US.  The challenge will be maintaining that level of minimalism after our return.

I’ll save the detailed travelogue and observations about life in Asia for future posts. For now, let’s talk about data science, big data, and mobile apps. My adventures in mobile startup land taught me that I have more love for databases, servers, backend services, and data in general than I do for mobile apps. This corresponds nicely to the recent upswing in interest in big data and data science.

While data science is multidisciplinary and definitions vary, it depends on three core skills as visualized on Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn diagram. I’m very confident in my hacking skills, and my love for reading and ongoing curiosity gives me a good foundation on the substantive expertise side. The one remaining gap is math and statistics knowledge. While I loved math and did very well in high school, I didn’t follow through in college.

While there are plenty of good schools in Asia, it’s easier and faster for me to address that math and statistics gap in the US.  Of course academic knowledge is one thing, and hands on experience is another. I want to focus on both. I decided that moving to the center of the Big Data universe in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area would be a great way to do that. Plus it doesn’t hurt that Stanford and Berkeley are in that area. So I bought one way tickets to San Francisco. I’m also looking at Vegas and Austin – data driven decision making dictates that lower cost and lower tax areas also merit consideration 🙂

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this next adventure plays out.  If you’re looking for a solid database guy with data scientist potential let’s talk.

PS: Apologies to lumberjacks and Monty Python fans everywhere for the title.

 

If you have sent me email within the past few days you may have run into a bounce message. I have been able to track the problem down to the MailFoundry spam filter appliance at my hosting provider. The hosting provider attempted to fix the problem, but still ran into issues. They have a ticket open with MailFoundry. If things don’t get resolved within another day I’ll just disable the MailFoundry service on my account for a while.

Until this gets resolved, feel free to use my Gmail address miks2u-at-gmail.com to bypass the problem.

By now you have probably heard that the Philippines was hit by a major typhoon yesterday.  Here’s a link from The Weather Channel:  http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/super-typhoon-philipines-photos_2010-10-18.  While it turned out to be a non-event for us in the Manila area, the northern part of the Philippines was hit very hard.

We are very concerned for Marissa’s aunts, sisters and younger brother that live in Ilocos Sur.  They are on the northwest coast near the South China Sea, which hopefully wasn’t damaged as much as the Pacific coast on the east.  But it’s quite likely that they faced 160-180kph (100-110mph) winds.  Marissa has not heard from them as of yet.  I am hoping that we will get confirmation that everybody is OK later today.

I strongly encourage you to donate to relief efforts, as many people will have lost their homes and their livelihood.  We plan to give to Marissa’s family directly to help with building damage and crop loss as well as donating to general relief efforts.

    Finally things have slowed down enough that I can catch up on blogging again.  The last month has been very busy with the mechanics of the transition.  Ramping up on my new job and looking for an apartment and a car have soaked up most of my free time for the past few weeks.  I’ll pick up the story of our move at the point where we left Portland.

We had a rude surprise as we checked in for our flight from Portland to Honolulu and Manila.  Hawaiian Airlines charged us extra baggage fees for our Portland to Honolulu leg.  This is the first time we have ever been charged extra for luggage on an international itinerary.  Thankfully I was able to add the additional charges to my expense report.  But I’ll definitely have to keep that in mind for future trips.  Other than that I liked Hawaiian well enough. 

We arrived in Honolulu as expected, but made the mistake of walking to baggage claim rather than riding the shuttle bus.  We got there just fine but it was a bit of a trek. 

We found out that we couldn’t check our bags through to Manila from Portland, so we had to get our overstuffed bags out of baggage claim, drag them to the Hertz shuttle bus, and keep them with us overnight. 

That proved to be a problem as we had reserved an intermediate car.  There was no way that three big rolling duffels, a large suitcase, a smaller suitcase and 3 carryons were going in the trunk of a Nissan Altima.  Thankfully Hertz was able to upgrade me to a Ford Flex on the spot.  Everything fit into the Flex just fine.  I have been wanting to try the Flex, as I’ve heard a lot of good things about it.  I found that it compared very favorably to our Explorer.

One great thing about being married to a Filipina is that she has friends all over the world.  Due to the lack of opportunity in the Philippines, many Filipinos emigrate to elsewhere in the world in search of better employment or business opportunities.  Marissa has friends in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Israel, Italy, Spain, the UK, most states of the US, Canada, and more.  It’s truly a global community.  For our stopover in Hawaii she tracked down college classmate Joelle Anne.  Joelle Anne totally hooked us up with a hotel room right on Waikiki Beach at an employee discount rate.  We spent some time hanging out on the beach, let the kids play in the surf, and caught up with old friends.

Later on we went out to dinner.  The funny thing was that we ended up going to Todai, a seafood buffet restaurant that also has a location in Portland.  It had been a long time since we went to the Portland Todai, so it was nice to have an opportunity to go there again. 

On Sunday morning I got up early and enjoyed some quiet time on the beach watching the waves and the surfers.  I even saw a couple practicing tandem surfing.  It looks hard enough doing lifts on a dance floor or ice rink.  I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to do acrobatics on a surfboard while riding a wave.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport for the next leg of our journey.  For the most part the flight was long but uneventful.  We were definitely thankful for Nintendo DS.  My seatmate for the long flight was very congenial. He was headed to the Philippines for both business and personal reasons.  I suspect that the personal side of his trip will work out, but there was more uncertainty around the business side.  But my guess is that he will do well.

I know it has been a while since I posted.  But given the amount of change and chaos that have happened over the past few weeks I think that’s understandable.  Let’s recap.

• Committed to a new job based on a few phone interviews.
• Left my job at Intel after 12 great years.
• Sold or gave away a huge portion of our stuff including our cars.
• Packed everything we decided to keep into a 3000lb sea cargo shipment and what we could take as airline checked baggage.
• Said goodbye to friends and family.
• Got on a plane, flew halfway around the world.
• Started the new job knowing nearly nothing about what I was getting into.

In my previous post about the move I discussed the considerations and decision process behind choosing my new job.  Once we made the decision and worked out the timeline, the next step was figuring out when to leave and what to take with us.  I was prepared to be all minimalist – sell everything that wouldn’t fit into checked bags and start over.  But my new employer included a full relocation in the package that they offered me.  I asked if they would give me additional cash instead of paying to move my stuff, but they would not.  Too bad, I would have rather had the money.  In the end we decided to move a selected subset of our furniture in hopes that we would be able to save money by renting an unfurnished place.

Once we decided to go forward with the sea cargo shipment it occurred to us that we should go to Costco and stock up on items that are hard to find or expensive in the Philippines.  $800 later we had a big stack of goodies in the family room when the movers showed up.

It really started to sink in that everything was changing after we sold our beds and the movers picked up the sea cargo shipment.  We ended up essentially camping in an empty house for our last week.

Our last week was a whirlwind of last minute preparations and saying goodbye to family and friends.  It’s one of life’s ironies that after you’ve made the decision to move away that you renew and refresh friendships with people you haven’t seen for a while.  I was really reminded of what a great group of friends we have around the Portland area.  Thankfully social media lets us stay in touch virtually, but of course it’s not the same.

I’ve come to realize that this story is very long, so I’ll leave off here and pick up next time with the details of the flight itself and our stopover in Hawaii.