

I also need help finding a remote job - mgarfias

So I saw the other posting and decided I should post something, as I also need help finding a remote job.<p>What I do:<p>I'm a *nix systems administrator (14 years of experience now) who worked for the past five years at sphere.com.  Been through an acquisition and all that.  I've lived for the past 4 years inside puppet's DSL automating services in puppet rather than in perl or python.<p>What I've done<p>Scaled sphere to almost 200 servers; saved us additional ops hires by implementing config management early (10 minutes from box delivery to operational); and saved something like $1.2M over 4 years in additional webserver costs by implementing varnish cache and tuning it to get an 82% hit rate.<p>What people say about me:<p>“Mike joined Sphere as one of its earliest employees, right before our first public beta launch. Mike has an impressive grasp of a wide range of technologies and keeps abreast of new developments. His constant drive to optimize kept Sphere running smoothly and cost-effectively during that first beta and throughout the many subsequent product launches and steep growth.”<p>“Mike joined Sphere during the early startup days as one of the first full-time employees. He juggled activities spanning a wide spectrum of system administration tasks. Mike impressed early on with a high degree of dedication, essentially responding to emails or phone calls at almost any time of the day, while maintaining a can-do, problem-solving attitude. He made significant contributions to our success.”<p>“I worked very closely with Mike at Sphere, designing our production infrastructure and stepping back to let him run with it. Despite our steep growth and continuous development strategy, Mike was always on top of our needs. His attention to detail, willingness to tackle any challenge, and aggressive pursuit of better solutions not only saved us many times, but laid a solid foundation for the company's success.”<p>Why I need remote:<p>I live on a farm in rural Oregon, about an hour out of portland.  I'll commute there if I have to, but I would rather give the commute time to my family.<p>Why I'm looking now:<p>Sphere was just spun out of AOL over to a new place, and they had four SAs already, and I'm nearly done with the transition assistance.  I've been looking for remote gigs, but haven't had luck finding opportunities.  In the mean time, I've been doing a bit of outside extra consulting to keep the skills sharp.<p>I'll happily send a resume out if requested.<p>Thanks!
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troyvit
I worked with Mike at Sphere through its buyout and subsequent spin-off. He's
the most skilled sysadmin I've met and is one of the few people in the world
who is completely honest in everything he does. Even though he knocks it,
Mike's perl and python looked pretty good to me (but I'm just a php hack). On
top of that, Mike's knowledge of the shell and the tools that come with it
(grep, awk, sed, etc.) is truly a thing to behold. And because of who he is
he's happy to help you learn it as well. So: smart, honest, hard working,
excellent at what he does and generous with his knowledge. You don't find many
sysadmins like that.

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nmcfarl
I too have worked with Mike - and can vouch for everything Troy says.

Mike is an excellent Dev Ops guy, capable of automating the heck out of your
backend, while assuring that everything stays up even under the most trying
circumstances.

He'll save you money and stress - if you need these skills you should
certainly talk with him.

