Get Your Technology Assistance from Us. But Why?

My name is Mike Baysek.  I'm part of the the last batch of 70's kids.  Not only do I have a bachelors degree in Information Technology and Management, 2008, but I also have professional experience dating back 20 years, and another 10 years experience as a self learned technology enthusiast as a young person.  Here's a little about me.

When I was 12, I wrote a relational database to catalog my baseball cards using DOS based Borland Paradox 6.0.  I designed a lot of cool views and input screens too.  I've been passionate about technology ever since.  During high school, I still had the code, and I saved it, and many other awesome works of programming and media arts all to a single CD which got destroyed.  I learned early that technology is amazing, and also dangerous if not taken seriously.  But then, I also learned an important lesson about redundancy and business continuity by the age of 20.  

After writing the baseball card database, later around age 14, when I got my Pentium 75 MHz computer as a teen, I loaded about 100 computer viruses on my old 286 to see what would happen.  It killed the BIOS and bricked the machine.  I also threw old, broken computers older than that off of a two story building at my friend's house to see what would happen.  Ahh, childhood. memories...

I've worked with everything from dinosaur databases and digital audio recording to server administration, statistical analytics, software/system engineering, Bitcoin and everything in between.   

In the 1990s, I downloaded every piece of software I could find.  I learned so much by trying different software.  I also ran a little Bulletin Board System (BBS) after dark on my parents phone line with a 14.4 modem that me and a few friends worked on.  That was before broadband, of course.  I used JetBBS as our software and tied up our parent's phone lines for hours, and got in big trouble (often) when we ran it during the day or evening.  

When I went to school, in 2001, I could already type 85 wpm.  When I left, I could type 120.  I get more work done, faster.  I also think about as fast as I type, and can type while mid-sneeze without a high error rate. 

I finished my Bachelors Degree in IT and Management in 2008, and by that time was already working at the Auton Lab at Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, doing system administration and insanely scalable analytics.  While working there, they send me all over the country and world to places like Sri Lanka and India to improve public response to health crises and also improve costs in fleet management, and probably a couple dozen other cool projects over a period of about seven years.  The awesome guys that hired me there now still run the amazing lab, and have done things like ran the self driving unit of Uber in Pittsburgh, advised President George W. Bush, and ran the Cloud Artificial Intelligence programs at Google.

Then I worked in hosting and cloud computing at Liquid Web.  There, I co-designed and built fault tolerant, self healing Petabyte scale storage systems with no single points of failure and improved other parts of the backend infrastructure.

I've profiled and debugged performance problems in software, scripts and websites thousands, probably 10,000+ times.  I look to improve performance and scalability by > 10x.  Sometimes, I've worked on projects where 1000x was achieved.  I've taken on some insane tasks, and have been able to produce some pretty insane results.

I monitor system metrics proactively, not reactively.  When something goes wrong, I can tell you when it happened, and why, as long as the metrics are available.  If they're not available, I can fix that too.

I have preferences about what technologies to work in, but I'm agnostic to that when it comes to fulfilling requirements.  If you need work done in some weird language, I know how to very quickly learn the new language and get to the task.  I've worked with dozens of employers and clients, and I learned a little something each time.  And I know dozens of languages and architectures already, and many of them, I learned because I had to solve some weird problem in a system that was unfamiliar to me when I started.  I've done this kind of thing countless times in my career.

I bring all of this experience to you and your project or organization.  You don't need to hire a full timer.  You need to hire ME.

You're welcome to look at my short form Resume and CV.  If you want a deeper dive, I'll schedule a call with you and go into dozens of key projects I've worked on since 2001. 

Thank you for considering me as your professional, contract only, independent, global system engineering resource.