Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

New Chapter: Swiftype

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, General, My Projects

So, after a few weeks of looking for a new job I’m really excited to start my journey in a young, but very ambitious startup called Swiftype which is focused on developing a technology for private site search, that could be used on everything from small blogs to large product sites. The company is growing really fast and I’m going to lead all the work on infrastructure, build the ops team and hope to get a chance to do some coding along the way.

Stay tuned – I really hope to finally get a chance to do more blogging this year. :-)

Looking for a New Gig

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, General, My Projects

As of today I’m no longer working for LivingSocial and I’m looking for the next thing to work on. Since my family is in Toronto and I have an apartment (mortgage) here, I’m not looking to relocate and currently looking for something remote (I have 7+ years of remote work experience) or something local in Toronto.

For more information on my background, please check my Github profile, my linkedin profile or the resume section on this blog. If you need to contact me, feel free to use any channels listed on the contacts page.

Update: After a few initial interviews I’d like to update this post with a bit more details on what I’m looking for in the new position.

First of all, I’m really not sure I want to be yet another ops engineer working on “everything ops” in my next company. If I’d be to join a company as a regular ops engineer, I’d prefer it to be a clearly defined role with a clear focus on some set of challenging problems. I’m honestly tired of setting up cacti/nagios/chef at this point and would like the job to be a little bit more challenging.

Though even more I’m interested in being able to make strategic technical decisions for an operations team and apply my experience and knowledge for solving challenging tasks with a dedicated team of ops engineers. This could be anything from a tech ops team lead role (in a medium/large companies) to a director of technical operations (in a small-to-medium sized startups).

Update: Ok, I’ve found a new job – I work for Swiftype now!

Scribd is Hiring (I’m Looking for an Operations Engineer to Join My Team)

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, Databases, Development, Links, Networks

Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the team. As a member of Scribd operations, you’ll have tremendous ownership and responsibility for one of the web’s most popular applications. Because Scribd is a startup, you will wear many hats and have broader responsibility than you would at a larger company.

If you read this blog, you should already have a good sense of the kind of work you’ll be doing on this position.

The Ideal Profile

You are an experienced operations professional and have run ops at at least one large-scale website. You have comprehensive knowledge of a broad variety of system tools, from MySQL and Nginx to Squid and Memcached. You should also have strong software development skills and be well-versed in major programming languages. You should be strongly motivated, a creative solution finder, and ready to jump into the thorniest technical problems whenever necessary.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and maintain all aspects of Scribd’s operations infrastructure, including system monitoring, backups, server configuration, databases, and caching systems
  • Collaborate with engineering to create next generation infrastructure to support changing requirements
  • Predict scaling problems before they occur and work with engineering to prevent them
  • Write and debug application level ruby code
  • Participate in an on-call rotation
  • Quickly diagnose server problems and employ preventive measures to maintain high availability servers

Qualifications

  • Bachelors degree in CS or equivalent experience
  • 3-5 years of professional experience in site operations
  • Strong software engineering skills, including knowledge of major programming languages
  • Strong database skills, preferably with MySQL, and overall linux knowledge
  • Experience with most of the following technologies: MySQL, Nginx, Ruby, Memcached, Squid, git, Solr, HBase, Postfix
  • Proven ability to quickly learn and implement unfamiliar technologies
  • Strong desire to work hard at a rapidly growing company

Location: You are preferably located near San Francisco, CA. Relocation assistance is designed on a per-case basis. In short, we’ll be creative to get you here.

Contact: Please send your email cover letter and resume with the subject “Your name – Senior Site Operations Engineer – via Kovyrin.net” to jobs@scribd.com or contact me directly using any of my contacts. All communication and correspondence is held in the strictest confidence to ensure that you can connect and learn more without exposure.

Cool Web Designer is Looking for Work

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, General, Links

My wife – a good web designer with 6 years of experience with web design, HTML and CSS is looking for a job. Here is some information about her:

We’re physically located in Toronto, Canada, but she has a great experience of working remotely too. So, if you need a web designer or a junior web designer, feel free to contact Tanya.

The Blog v.2.0

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, My Projects

Long time ago, in 2002 I decided to create my own point of presence in the Internet. Back then I’ve got pretty nice domain (scoundrel.kremenchug.net), hacked up a few pages on php, added a guestbook and that was it. Many years it was almost static and I did a few updates on my resume page few times a year. Later I’ve switched the site to wordpress to make it easier to manage my resume and stuff

And 3 years ago in March 2006 I’ve decided to start my own blog. I took a standard template and started the blog on a separate domain while the domain was on its own domain name… This spring my wife made me a great birthday present – she’s created me a custom blog design that has all the stuff I wanted from my own web site for a long time. My friend Dima Shteflyuk has helped me with creating a wordpress template from Tanya’s mockups and here we are – now I’ve decided to merge my blog and my web site into a single web entity called http://kovyrin.net/. Welcome to my new blog/site/whatever!

Blog outage

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, General

Sorry for a short outage today – we were moving to a new server we had some problems because of software incompatibilities on the new box. Now all sites on this box should behave as usual :-)

RSS Feed has been fixed

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog

Because of some weird bug my RSS feeds were broken ever since I’ve upgraded to WP 2.5. Today they were fixed and I hope they’ll have some new posts there soon :-) Stay tuned.

SOS!

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog, Networks · русский

This blog turned 1 year old last month and I think all of my readers were glad to read it. I’ve never asked for help and I offered help to people who needed it. But today I’m forced to ask my readers for help because it is the first time in my long practice when I really don’t know how to solve my problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Job, New Country, New Life!

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Blog · русский

I apologize for the lack of posting on my blog. Life has been pretty busy as last month I started a new job as Senior System Administrator in Toronto, On at a leading video hosting community.

I am very excited about this job and look forward to working with a great team that is really passionate about what they are doing.

As time goes by I will be posting more. At the moment, thanks for staying tuned.