🔎 I’m Rob Muhlestein, a 55-year-old platform engineer by trade, gray-hat hacker for fun, polyglot, culture journalist, mentor and FOSS contributor. I live in Mooresville, North Carolina, USA in an apartment while my !wife completes her !art residency. I prefer not to say where I work specifically.
💰🏦🌐 I work from !home for TEKSystems (!tek) as a full-time Kubernetes (!k8s) cloud native infrastructure engineer and software developer (!dev) for a well-paying multinational corporation (!dox) supporting thousands of high performance machine learning compute nodes. !findjob
💻📞 I’ve been working 100% remote since 2000. I was hired as fully remote by !IBM after I was head-hunted by a recruiter out of !Nike. Working remotely requires strong separation of your work environment from your living space, usually. After 20 years I’m okay mixing the two. Most can’t. I plan on !coworking from the road and !IRL !twitch streaming in 2022 at some point.
🌎🥾 https://rtirl.com/twitch:447179030 During IRL streams I publish my location so people can see the places I visit and help me find fun places to explore. If you are nearby and want to join me for a walk please do. I think meeting great people and letting people see exactly what area we have covered is worth the risk (as do many other IRL streamers).
💚 You have permission to have a life, a real life. You don’t need anyone to give that to you. Seize the day. Do something “in real life” that one day you won’t be able to. Do one thing every day that scares you. Keep it real. I try to do this myself, to get outside and do more than just sit at my desk.
🌴 Served Mormon mission to French West Indies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin). I was made Assistant to the President and flew all over (Barbados, etc.) Loved it even though I lost my faith. I read shit in church history about black people that made me vomit. I never got over it. That was the beginning of the end. Lots of stories though, if I’m drunk enough.
🏫 I graduated Brigham Young University (BYU) with Russian Language degree, partial Honors, and just shy of a minor in French and Computers and Linguistics. I was there >6 years, worked 3 jobs concurrently: language lab, French/Russian instructor, bike shop mechanic, language/culture instructor and Resident Assistant at Mormon Missionary Training Center.
“Clearly, you have a talent for educating people in tech. … After [this] success, I suspect the review team will be even more interested in picking up one or two of your students. We’ve had a lot of very bright interns from some of the top universities in the country and [your community member] was right in the mix with the best of them.” (InfluxDB)
We’ve been stuck in an apartment for the since 2021 or so. We were kicked out of our rental even though promised five-years because Covid hit our renter hard and they needed to “liquidate the asset.” We were really lucky to find anything at all. This is why we have so much stuff crammed into this place and have a hard time keeping it clean and organized. It’s not really a home, but it is better than the street. Ironically, my wife and I make a combined income enough to buy a house on the lake, but we are waiting to find the perfect place rather than just have to move again later. Apartment living has helped me keep my feet on the ground and be around people about whom I might otherwise forget (even if they did steal my bike, but I got it back).
One of the things I really enjoy about these last years is rediscovering where I live by traveling outdoors and exploring by bike. I get to stream and share most of it. It’s become something I really look forward to doing every day.