Eric Frazier
2003-Aug-11 16:13 UTC
Wanted for consulting contract: The Pure to go with our Applied.
Hi, I work for a medium sized company as what they call the "Lead Programmer" What that actually entails is a great deal more than programming. I am responsible for designing and maintaining on the order of 20 servers, mostly FreeBSD and a few Linux that are being phased out. This is in addition to my responsibility to give direction to our programming, doing programming, and making technology choices. There are 3 other programmers in our company, but being the senior guy, there is a realm that I have to somewhat go it alone through. Recently we have been making some very major changes to our network structure and spending a fair bit of money on new hardware and other services. We use mysql and have a mysql support contract which has served us very well. What I am looking for is someone who can provide the same type of service in other areas as a paid consultant. The areas of concern are the FreeBSD OS in general, esp issues like ethernet card performance, SCSI HD performance tweaking, sysctl vars, file system types, and SMP. Most important though is someone who has a VERY in depth understanding of how software like Apache makes use of FreeBSD memory and other resources in high to very high load situations. In general the more experience you have with high loads with FreeBSD the more I would want to talk to you. The kind of person I am looking for is also C programmer who has at lease dabbled with Kernel hacking, VM tuning. A person who can explain the different philosophy between FreeBSD VM and Linux VM without looking it up. Also along the lines of performance, a good knowledge of TCP and it's particulars on FreeBSD. Personality wise, we need someone who is a good teacher, in that they like to teach. The most brilliant people I have met, at least so far in life, are also very humble. I think great knowledge combined with a great thirst for learning breeds humility. I expect that the time commitment will depend on how easy my questions are for the person doing the work. At the level of person I have in mind I would expect them to end up billing us for 5-10 hours a week on avg. More than simple advice would be involved, but no grunt work at all other than the leg work it takes to make an improvement, solve a problem, and provide a written explanation of the process. That would likely include a phone conversation or two to answer questions. So hopefully this will be fun work! Geographically, we need to be in the same time zone, so we very much prefer someone on the west coast USA/Canada. I hope this description is clear enough, I find most job ads are much too terse and ambiguous. Please contact me at ef@kwinternet.com if you are interested. I expect this to be a long search, so please forward this post to anyone you think might be appropriate. Thanks, Eric Lead Programmer D.M. Contact Management 250.383.0836