Hello/Salut/Hoi/Hallo,

If you landed here, then you probably want to learn a bit about the person behind it.
Let me try and make a nice introduction then.

I’m Mihai, a Customer Solutions Architect, former Network/Systems/Security/whatever falls upon my hands engineer, a techie person always eager to learn more and expand his knowledge.

Wait, wait…what does this really mean ?

I am a deep dive techie that wanted to also learn a bit about how a company and the sales process works so I reoriented myself toward a more mixed role (technical PreSales and its various names across the industry spectrum).

Tech side experience

I work on a daily basis with various Clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba) and went through the whole spectrum of technologies like Linux (lately also a bit of eBPF), FreeBSD/OpenBSD, Solaris, Cisco (6500, 7600, ASR9K, Nexus, UCS), Juniper (MX, QFX, Contrail), Security (Linux based firewalls, ASA, SRX, penetration testing / trying out vulnerabilities in API of services or exploits and patching accordingly), Virtualization (VMWare, KVM) and Containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Openshift).

I’m also fascinated with seeing how a blackbox solution works (this means breaking into it, seeing how it’s built, tracing its logic and most fun…finding where programmers cut corners in implementation as a consequence of strict timelines and sales push).

Despite being able to read code, reverse engineer it, change it or adapt it to my needs I don’t see myself as a programmer, albeit ChatGPT & Bard make programming seem easy nowadays. => Intent based programming

Hobbies

  • Hiking
  • Badminton
  • Cooking, albeit sometimes it ends up with smoke signals
  • Travelling to non-touristic places, learning about the culture, customs, traditions around the world
    (still wanting to reach Buthan at some point in my life)

Self improvement courses

  • Financial Education / Passive income course + coaching
  • NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programing) course + bootcamp
  • Public Speaking course

Languages I speak

  • Romanian and sometimes being a grammar freak
  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Italian

Books I’ve read

  • Hoi, your Swiss German survival guide (Sergio J. Lievano, Nicole Egger) :)
  • How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie)
  • Amp it UP (Frank Slootman)
  • From Strength to Strength (Arthur C. Brooks)
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
  • Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey A. Moore)
  • Launch (Jeff Walker)
  • The Wisdom of Insecurity (Alan Watts)
  • The Qualified Sales Leader (John McMahon)
  • Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (Noah Goldstein’s, Steve Martin’s and Robert Cialdini)
  • Influence Science and Practice (Tom Peters)
  • Negotiation Genius (Deepak Malhotra, Max Bazerman)
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)
  • Why we sleep (Matthew Walker)
  • The Warren Buffett Way (Robert Hagstrom)

What will basically be around here?

Anything in the lines of:

  • Cloud/MultiCloud
  • Network / Systems Engineering
  • Openshift / Openstack / virtualization / datacenter topics
  • Security (after some sleepless nights I passed the Offensive Security OSCE)
  • Reverse engineering products, solutions, Linux stuff
  • Other topics (I did my own Romanian automated Sour Cabbage solution using a pump, a Raspberry PI, a Relay Board and Home Assistant)

Other projects

  • Made a bootable JunOS USB stick that could flash and upgrade the firmware on underlying HDDs, resyncing the data back, then rebooting and making sure that it does not start again from the external media.
  • IPTV solution for one of my previous employers from ground level deployment (Seachange, Broadpeak CDN, Envivio Encoders, Verimatrix encryption, VMWare + Active Directory on UCS, F5 LB configuration + iRULEs and custom header modifications).
  • Contrail PoC using both vMX and ASR9K in the role of DC Gateway.

How to reach me

You can find me at LinkedIn.
You can also drop me an email mihai {a-t} mihai.tech