I am Sam Gleske. Over the years I’ve contributed a lot of useful content throughout the Internet. Finally, I’ve decided to go through that content and consolidate the useful bits on this website. I’ll cover varying topics such as Japanese Anime, Education, Engineering, Slice of Life, and any other whims I choose. This first post allows you, as the reader, to get to know me a bit.
The first family computer I used was the IBM PC AT
80286 which had a little turbo button on it to make it go faster.
It was running Windows 3.1 on top of DOS and to get
the graphical environment you would type win after booting up. I remember my
father doing taxes on it; playing games with my siblings and I such as Indy
500 and Chip’s Challenge. It had a 3.5” and 5.25” floppy drive
(it was actually floppy). It was accidentally thrown out while I was away at
college. It would have been cool to donate it to a museum because it was in
perfect working condition. That and I liked the games.
Fast forward a few years to middle school. I built my first website probably around 1999. I was a drummer in a band of two kids (Donnie Crabtree and I) who liked to hang out and jam. I thought it would be cool for the band to have a website so I learned HTML and CSS. The site had frames and iframes. It was cool and was hosted on geocities because that was a thing then. I still actively play drums.
Fast forward again a few years to high school. During my Junior and Senior year, I had a very inspirational teacher, Mr. Mark Lemieux. In his course I learned how to install and configure Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP, and our little class had a domain controller in which the cluster was connected to the DC. We had a little RedHat 9 box in the corner that students occasionally played with. We learned how to troubleshoot hardware, implement and install physical networking, we made drops and patch cables, and the school occasionally farmed us out for a little child labor when minor computer problems would arise in different departments. I also have fond memories of the students taking breaks to play Red Alert 2 in 4v4 matches. I learned my first programming language in my spare time: JavaScript. I learned it not from a book, but reading thousands of samples I found on the Internet viewing the source of web pages. Every time I saw a cool feature I would try to download all the source and implement just that feature in JavaScript just to see if I could get it to work. I learned programming by inferring it’s meaning from the plethora of samples I viewed on websites. Poking and prodding, witnessing what happened when I changed the code around and reading terribly formed error messages in IE6. It was a fun experience and I attribute my entire career and passion for computers to this time period. Thanks Mr. Lemieux.
The college years. In High School, I learned about computer software and a bit about the hardware. Now my passion leaned toward learning how to design them. Computer Engineering seemed like a logical choice for me. I did a random internet search for top Computer Engineering schools in the country. Whatever list I was reading had Drexel University listed as #1. It was the only school I applied to and I got in. Good thing, because I put all of my eggs in one basket without much thought for the consequences. I proceeded on a colorful journey of open source exploration and a Renaissance of learning. I learned around 20 or 30 different programming languages outside of my normal coursework. This passion for learning caused my normal school curriculum to suffer. Eventually I fell back to working full time and being a part-time student.
I have implemented continuous integration and continuous delivery solutions for multiple companies. My solutions support more than 1000 users in practice via a self service solution based on Jenkins. The solutions I have implemented are still used today. My current passion is to help companies grow faster and scale farther by removing barriers for engineering teams through automation. I have experience designing large scale solutions which support diverse development needs across multiple platforms, including: Linux (multiple variants), Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.
I open source most of my personal work which includes scalable solutions for large enterprises (fortune 50 and larger). Some examples of open source software I maintain include:
- GIMP project Jenkins instance.
- The GitHub OAuth Jenkins Plugin - used by Jenkins to offload authentication and authorization to GitHub organizations and teams.
- The GitHub Pull Request Builder Jenkins Plugin - it is used by Jenkins to validate pull requests as part of automated peer review and continuous integration.
- gitlab-mirrors is a popular GitLab project which allows one to mirror source code repositories from other SCM hosting platforms into GitLab.
- Jervis is a library meant to be used in Jenkins which allows a person to scale a Jenkins instance with self service capabilities through the Job DSL Plugin and Jenkins Pipeline Plugin.
- Jenkins Bootstrap Shared project, which allows automated provisioning and configuration of a Jenkins instance. It allows the support of immutable infrastructure.
- Jenkins Bootstrap Jervis uses Jenkins Bootstrap Shared project in order to provision a fully configured Jenkins instance with scalable self service capabilities. It allows developers to on-board quickly by adding YAML to their project describing how to build and deploy their project.
I regularly contribute time to helping other Linux users by posting at LinuxQuestions.org. I also enjoy reading technical manuals and playing games in my spare time. My parents are awe-inspiring. I have two brothers and a sister; all are successful. I have a wonderful fiancé. I am a fortunate man.