Justin Kulesza

I want to make technology work for people to solve problems.

Originally from the Detroit area, I moved to the Grand Rapids area to attend Grand Valley State University, pursuing a degree in Information Systems. I immediately recognized that I preferred West Michigan to Southeast Michigan, and decided to live here permanently. I graduated from the GVSU Padnos College of Engineering and Computing and the Meijer Honors College in 2010 with a B.S. in Information Systems and a General Business minor. After graduation, I began my job here at Atomic Object.

My past experiences and job roles have been somewhat varied:

• My first experience, during high school, involved managing and maintaining a local elementary school’s computer network. This gave me my first taste of system administration and support as I configured and maintained the school’s workstations, servers, printers, and network. In addition, I assisted students and teachers in utilizing these technology resources.
• My next industry experience involved computer and software support at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, MI. At Beaumont Hospital, I assisted hospital staff and physicians in properly utilizing their technology. This involved not only teaching best practices in technology use, but also diagnosing and repairing numerous hardware and software problems.
• Prior to graduating from GVSU, I completed an internship with Gordon Food Service in Grand Rapids, MI. At GFS, I developed software for B2B (Business-to-Business) commerce applications in Java and Perl. My time as a developer greatly enhanced my understanding of the software development process, and my programming skills.

While I have acted in several different roles and capacities, I have greatest interest in and passion for operational support and system administration. I want to make technology work for others. I enjoy some aspects of programming, but I much more prefer helping people better utilize existing technology and computing solutions. In addition, I enjoy setting up, maintaining, and operating secure servers to support these solutions

This has led me to Atomic Object where I am the system administrator and operational support lead for the SME Toolkit, a project sponsored by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group. I maintain the servers and services necessary to keep the SME Toolkit website running, as well as pioneer new and innovative solutions to the unique infrastructure and hosting issues posed by the project. Additionally, I provide operational support for the SME Toolkit, consulting on SEO, social media, UI usability, security, internationalization and communication protocols.

My role on the SME Toolkit project keeps me proficient with:

• Programming languages, such as Ruby, SQL, Bash, and PHP.
• Products, such as Linux/UNIX, MySQL, Apache, Nginx, Monit, Nagios, and Xen Server.
• Technologies and standards, such as SMS, virtualization, and Unicode.

Character encodings and character data representations are of particular interest for me—both on the SME Toolkit project, and in my spare time. I work with varying character sets very often, and have a significant understanding of and appreciate for the Unicode standard. I often run into character encoding issues when working on internationalization for the SME Toolkit, and try to blog about my experienced on the Atomic spin blog.

In my free time I enjoy reading science fiction (e.g. Asimov) and fantasy (e.g. Tolkien), biking, running, cross-country skiing, and keeping up on technology trends.

Blog Posts:

• Converting UTF-8 to the 7-bit GSM Default Alphabet
• Hiring a Professional Problem Solver
• Some Useful Iconv Functionality
• Character Encoding Tricks for Vim
• MySQL: Failed Registration of InnoDB as a Storage Engine
• Preventing Spam E-mail with SPF Records
• Concatenated SMS Messages and Character Counts
• Vi Editing Mode of Bash
• Making Your Site Visible to Search Engines with Sitemaps
• Resizing LVM Volumes on a Virtual Linux Host without Reboot
• Running Low on Disk Space Using MySQL Replication?
• Character Encoding Fun With SMS Messages
• Extracting a Table from a MySQL Dump
• Monitoring and Management with Monit and Nagios
• Strategies for Making your Server Migration Successful
• Working with embedded CDATA in XML documents
• On the Importance of Character Sets and Character Encodings in MySQL
• Converting to UTF-16 and UCS-2 with Iconv

Publications:

• Kulesza, J., DeHondt II, G., Nezlek, G., (2010). “More Technology, Less Learning ?”.
  The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference, v.27 n. 1333, Nashville, TN.