Nikolai Lifanov

Nikolai hacks on systems. This means doing things that haven't meant to be done to create a useful effect in a hurry. Over the last decade, he had experience in everything from running HA infrastructures on donated pre-fail hardware to dealing with emergency spikes in service demand by padding the infrastructure with cloud services within hours. He builds robust and observable systems that are hard to "break" and easy to "fix". He got his hands wet with FreeBSD somewhat recently, with 7.0, and fell in love with its transparency. Since then, he has built solutions from other BSDs, from creating an immutable live cd NetBSD hypervisors (a la SmartOS) to founding a hosting business on DragonFly. His hobbies include researching obscure ancient arcane Unix lore and Origami.