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Resetting the Blog
Published by Mike Staszel on May 1, 2023

Hi there, I’m Mike.

  • 🔭 I’m currently working on big data engineering with Spark on k8s on AWS at iSpot.tv.
  • 🌱 I’m focusing on mentoring and coaching my team to improve their skills and release awesome products.
  • 🌎 I occasionally write blog posts about software engineering and other topics.

Management and Software Engineering

I consider myself to be a software engineer at heart. Nowadays I’m trying to do less code-writing and more of everything else:

  • Reading and learning.
  • Writing, writing, and more writing.
  • Thinking about design patterns and architecture (how do you scale k8s? what should we be researching?)
  • Mentoring and leading a team building products and shipping features
  • Hiring (!)

Stuff I’ve Worked On

  • Django! My first internship and full-time job was at a startup that was built on top of Django.
  • Built an Android app for fun. It was much easier than multiple failed attempts of creating an iOS app.
  • Machine Learning. Just scratched the surface. Data cleansing and feature engineering really is 95% of the job.
  • Built a CHIP-8 emulator. It plays Pong and that’s pretty much it. Maybe I’ll work on a Gameboy emulator next.
  • Spark, Hadoop, Hive. On-prem, on Azure, on GCP, on AWS — you name it. Now we’re running Spark on k8s. Also AWS EC2, EMR, ECS, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, CodePipeline, VPC, IAM, CloudFormation, and plenty more acronyms.
  • Now, I’m an engineering manager, managing a team that does a lot of what I wrote about above!

Everything Else

My wife and I enjoy hiking, biking, traveling, and playing with our Shih Tzu.

Shih Tzu

Featured Posts

  1. A typical modern Spark stack nowadays most likely runs Spark jobs on a Kubernetes cluster, especially for heavy usage. Workloads are moving away from EMR on EC2 to either EMR on EKS or open-source Spark on EKS. When you’re running Spark on EKS, you probably want to scale your Kubernetes nodes up and down as you need them. You might only need to run a few jobs per day, or you might need to run hundreds of jobs, each with different resource requirements.

    aws development kubernetes

  2. Hi there, I’m Mike. 🔭 I’m currently working on big data engineering with Spark on k8s on AWS at iSpot.tv. 🌱 I’m focusing on mentoring and coaching my team to improve their skills and release awesome products. 🌎 I occasionally write blog posts about software engineering and other topics. Management and Software Engineering I consider myself to be a software engineer at heart. Nowadays I’m trying to do less code-writing and more of everything else:

    development