Changing How the World Works.
 
 
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Total oDesk hours:
0
Location:
Stanford-le-hope, United Kingdom (GMT)
English Skills: (self-assessed)
5.0
Member Since:
August 16, 2008
Last Worked:
 
Current Assignments:
0
Total Assignments:
0
oDesk Ready:  
Yes
 
 
 
 

Karl Jorgensen - Linux Professional Developer and Administrator - Freelance System / Database Administrator, United Kingdom

Over the last 17 years I have been involved in all phases of software development - analysis, design, implementation, testing, rollout, support and administration.

I am a geek. And I take pride in my work. This means that sometimes I will insist on getting things "just right" where others see no difference at all, but I am usually proven correct in the end.
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Recent Work History & Feedback
Buyer ID From/To Job Title Hours Feedback
Work History & Feedback is empty
See All Tests Taken (11 items)
oDesk Tests Taken
Name of Test Score Percentile Date Taken Duration
SQL Test 3.60 97% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 34 min
Unix Shell Script 4.00 95% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 37 min
Unix Test 4.25 92% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 13 min
MySQL 5.0 Test 3.60 91% TOP 10% 08/26/2008 36 min
C Programming Test 4.10 90% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 36 min
Recent Candidacies
Job Opening Title Initiated By Date
XSL-FO transform for XML to PDF needed Provider November 22, 2008
Lex and YACC developer Provider November 22, 2008
Job Category Interests

Software Development

Networking & Information Systems

Administrative Support
Skills
Skill Experience Level Last Used Description
Apache administration 7 yrs 5.0 2008 24x7 - Part of my current job
Build/Release management 4 yrs 5.0 2008 Experienced build/release manager with the following tools:
- Makefile
- Automake
- Autoconf
- Subversion
- Ant
- CUnit and JUnit
- Building Debian packages
- Building Redhat/CentOS RPM packages
Since I also have a strong system administrator background, I tend to build each application as an deb/rpm package, and enforce strict rules with regard to releases.  Although this can lead to some friction with developers, once the realise that this means that their testing environments are actually usuable, overall productivity increases
Linux System Administration 7 yrs 5.0 2008 Mainly (and preferred) Debian and Ubuntu
3 years experience in Redhat and CentOS too.
MySQL Administration 4 yrs 4.0 2008 Part of my current full-time job
Oracle DBA 9 yrs 5.0 2007 Certified oracle DBA
Certifications
Date Earned Name Score Percentile Organization Description
No Certifications
Employment History
From To Company Title/Role Description
05/2008 Present Fizzback Systems Administrator Team Leader / Manager Lead for a small team administrering our linux servers throughout the world. This team is geographically distributed (China, US and Ukraine).

We are mainly responsible for:
- Linux Servers (mostly Redhat, some CentOS and Debian)
- MySQL databases (replication, backups, performance)
- Tomcat instances (mostly tomcat6, some tomcat5)
- Security (firewalls, auditing)
- General system monitoring (I set up Nagios to automate this)

We spend most of our time upgrading the servers to Debian (lenny), and creating custom RPM/Deb packages to make it easier to upgrade and set up new servers.
01/2008 05/2008 Genworth Financial CVS Administrator / Independent Contributor A 3-month contract where I handled the migration from TIA Workbench to CVS.

This had to occur without interruption to the development team, whilst still migrating their 21 live installations across (each live installation is slightly different).

During the process, we split TIA into modules, where some modules could be identical across all installations, thus reducing the complexity.

(The client insisted on CVS, although subversion would arguably be a better choice in my opinion)
06/2007 12/2007 Mobile Streams Build Manager / Independent Contributor A 6-month contract where my role was to bring their development procedures, release procedures, build management, live and test environments under control.

I set up (and enforced) the new development procedures, allowing developers to work on branches and deploying to controlled test environments and enforced unit testing.

I also created standard build procedures for all internal applications, so each developer could have their own private environements, simply by running "./configure && make".

Once the developers had their own environments, and unit testing was enforced, productivity increased by an order of magnitude - simply because the developers did not get in eachothers way, and everybody could rely on the unit testing and rely on the correctness of the testing environments.

I also rolled out Mediawiki to handle all the internal documentation, which was adopted by all the developers and programme managers.
Education
From To School Degree Area of Study Description
01/1988 08/1991 Niels Brock Other Datamatiker Equvalent to an UK degree in computer science
 
  • Project Title: Gnubversion
  • Attachment: none
  • Completed: 01/17/2008
  • Category: Software Development > Desktop Applications
  • URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnubversion/
  • Description: I am the main author behind Gnubversion - A GNOME interface to Subversion available at sourceforge.
 
  • Project Title: ssh-ssl-proxy
  • Attachment: none
  • Completed: 04/09/2007
  • Category: Networking & Information Systems > Other - Networking
  • URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssh-ssl-proxy/
  • Description: I am the author of ssh-ssl-proxy - a proxy that allows administrators to run HTTPS and SSH on the same listening port
Hourly Assignment History
Buyer ID From/To Job Title Hours Feedback
Hourly Assignment History is empty
Fixed-Price Assignment History
Buyer ID From/To Job Title Paid Feedback
Fixed-Price Assignment History is empty
oDesk Tests Taken
Name of Test Score Percentile Date Taken Duration
SQL Test 3.60 97% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 34 min
Unix Shell Script 4.00 95% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 37 min
Unix Test 4.25 92% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 13 min
MySQL 5.0 Test 3.60 91% TOP 10% 08/26/2008 36 min
C Programming Test 4.10 90% TOP 10% 08/25/2008 36 min
TCP/IP 3.90 87% TOP 20% 08/25/2008 30 min
Internet Security Test 3.25 81% TOP 20% 08/30/2008 23 min
Data Structures 2.90 79% 08/30/2008 31 min
Firewall Concepts Test 3.75 75% 08/30/2008 14 min
English Test (Sentence Structure) 4.50 73% 08/17/2008 16 min
oDesk Readiness Test for Independent Contractors and Company Managers 4.40 64% 08/25/2008 18 min