It’s the cloud.
Tell us a little about yourself and your experience.
My name is Jonathan Zuilkowski and I am a Senior Cloud Dev.
Engineer atAtlantic.Net, a cloud hosting company.
I have been working on virtualized and cloud environments for a number of years.
I originally got familiar with virtual servers on Linux around 1997, in the financial industry.
While this was not necessarily cloud architecture, the tools and methods were similar.
In 2009, I began working on a large scale internal cloud that hosted a scientific data analysis platform.
What is cloud hosting and what is it typically used for?
Cloud servers compress this into a virtual server running on a host.
Customers no longer have to be concerned with hardware failure or hardware becoming obsolete.
Also, it can take anywhere from one day to a week or more to provision a hardware server.
All of this can now be accomplished over the connection from anywhere in the world.
What drove you to choose your career path?
The enjoyment I get from systems management and automation coding drove me to choose this career path.
What kind of education and experience did you need?
I would like to see the industry shift toward aptitude rather than educational pedigree.
Read, study, practicethe information is all out there for free.
What kinds of things do you do beyond what people see?
What do you actually spend the majority of your time doing?
What misconceptions do people often have about your job?
What sort of tools are you actually using day to day?
For my development, I code inPythonand I primarily useJetBrains PyCharm.
It’s a fantastic IDE that covers everything I need to do.
We also useGitfor version control, andAtlassian Jirafor project management and change control.
We venture to keep it very simple so that the tools do not become a hindrance.
To be honest, I do in fact rely heavily on aterminalas well.
What are your average work hours?
Usually 9-12 hours, although there has been an 18 hour day here or there, as needed.
What personal tips and shortcuts have made your job easier?
Knowing how to prioritize is also extremely important.
What do you do differently from your coworkers or peers in the same profession?
What do they do instead?
What is considered abhorrent today, might as well become standard practice tomorrow.
What is common today will eventually become obsolete.
There are problems and technological solutionstry to keep it simple and avoid dogma.
What’s the worst part of the job and how do you deal with it?
You will inevitably be forced to deal with prior decisions you’ve made that you wish you hadn’t.
I choose to use these as a feedback loop for designing the future and avoiding potential pain.
What’s the most enjoyable part of the job?
Innovating cost effective, more efficient systems.
These directly improve customer experience and are a joy to maintain.
The most enjoyable part of the job however, is the team I work with.
Having a compatible team is, to me, the most important quality of a company.
Do you have any advice for people who need to enlist your services?
Until a problem or goal is defined, you cannot offer a solution.
What kind of money can one expect to make at your job?
This varies considerably based on experience and skill set.
How do you move up in your field?
Keep up to date on current technology and always ask yourself “what’s missing?”
There is always opportunity to grow and create.
Don’t be afraid to borrow older ideas, or ideas from unrelated fields.
Be a contributor and a creator.
What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?
Spend time learning the ins and outs of the various flavors of Linux.
Spend more time researching the direction it will be taking.
Read about the goals and milestones of the various distributions.
Use your imagination and don’t be afraid to suggest outlandish ideas, they often spawn good discussion.
All that we do today would have been considered madness 100 years ago.
If you’d like to share your career, email us at[email protected].
Photo byYentafern(Shutterstock).
