Sebastian Sobolewski

About Me

Welcome, my name is Sebastian Sobolewski. I was born in Poland in 1975 under communist rule. My father was an activist in the “Solidarity” movement that rose to eventually free Poland from the communist regime. In 1985 my family was granted political asylum in the United States, so we immigrated to escape Political persecution. It allowed us to start our lives from scratch.

I graduated High School in 1993 upon which I enrolled in the Computer Science program at Syracuse University. While attending school there I also worked full time in several Internet startups including the now defunct AppliedTheory Communications which was spun off from NYSERNet.

After the spin-off of AppliedTheory I moved on to spend some time at Maxtor where I developed Drive Test equipment software to run Maxtor’s manufacturing lines. While there I introduced the use of Linux and associated GNU software as the foundation of many of Maxtor’s factory systems.

From there, a group of us left to fund LeftHand Networks, a TCP/IP Based Storage software company. We pioneered the delivery of block storage over networks long before iSCSI came into reality using our own AEBS (Advanced Ethernet Block Storage) storage protocol. AEBS formed the foundation of the distributed storage solution at the hard of the LeftHand Networks storage servers, even long after the front end services provided industry standard supported protocols. ( Such as iSCSI, Fibre Channel, etc ).

I departed LeftHand Networks to pursue other interests within the storage industry in June,2006. Finally Landing as one of the starter engineers in the VMware Broomfield, CO office working on the ESX 4.0+ iSCSI Initiator and the Associated iSCSI management stack. Working closely with 3rd party vendors such as Broadcom and Equalogic we build an externally visible API to allow any iSCSI storage vendor to manage iSCSI Session origination from the ESX initiator.

In 2011 I reunited with 2 other former LeftHand Founders (John Spiers and Kelly Long) along with several other leading developers in the Denver area to get NexGen Storage off the ground. Over the course of my time there, I architected and personally coded NexGens’ Distributed Management API as well as the Mirroring IO Journal and Cache system that was responsible for the backbone of NexGen’s industry leading IO performance.

Today my journey is continuing at DigitalOcean where we strive to solve Cloud Computing problems for independent developers, startups

Specialties

Cloud Computing / Big Data
Distributed Systems (Specializing in Storage)
Enterprise Storage Systems ( Hardware, Software, Technology )
Programing Languages: Go Lang, C/C++, Python, Java, Pascal, HTML/CSS
Tools/Technologies: Linux, BSD, NFS, Ceph, KV DBs (consul, etcd, etc), SQL DBs (mysql, postgres), Nomad, K8s, gRPC, Android SDK, Micro Services
Protocols: TCP/IP (TCP/SCTP/UDP), iSCSI, SCSI, NVME, SATA, I2C, ISA/PCI/PCIe Hardware buses, and associated analysis tools. ( FC/SATA Bus Analyzers, etc. ).
Hardware: x86, ARM, Microchip PIC18/PIC24/PIC32

One Important Truth

Experts are great at telling you where things are today, but, they cannot tell you where things will be tomorrow.

They fall into a proximity paradox, where they have spent their entire careers so close to the problem space they are in, in building the now, that they cannot see the tomorrow.

For that you need an outsider, someone with a fresh outlook on the state of things to ask the important question of: Why can’t we do this another way?

Employment History

Patents

Software Engineer

Maxtor
1998 - 2000

Lead Developer for Factory Test Equipment
Acoustic Disk Tests Software
MIT (Mechanical Integration Test) Software

At Maxtor I was the lead software developer on a variety of internally build Hard Disk test tools. From Acoustic Testers designed to identify faulty bearings in drive motors, to validating particle and head flight parameters. My favorite accomplishment was the introduction of Linux/GNU software into the Maxtor Factory as part of the test software stack. We were able to significantly reduce the cost of of our equipment by avoiding expensive license fees for Windows NT that was previously running the factory. This was done by building a driver framework that enabled us to simply cross-compile our test software to Linux.

Founder

LeftHand Networks
2000 - 2006

Co-Founder of LeftHand Networks Storage
AEBS Linux and Windows Driver
iSCSI Target Software
Storage and Device Management Stack
Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for rapid platform/hardware support
Developed the LeftHand VSA (Virtual Storage Appliances)

LeftHand Networks was my first Zero to One startup. I was involved in all areas of the company from ground up engineering, to feature definition, to managing day to day operations. One of my most proud efforts there was the development of the industry first VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance). A port of the LeftHand SANiQ Product to VMWare ESX which enabled the pooling of the stranded storage of multiple ESX servers into a sharable pool for use by any VMs running in the ESX infrastructure. In 2008, LeftHand Networks was acquired by HP.

Senior MTS, IP Storage Group

VMWare
2007 - 2011

ESX iSCSI Initiator
IMA plugins for VmWare SW iSCSI Drive and Broadcom TOE
Vendor Neutral IMA Extensions for ESX iSCSI Target and Initiator Management

At VMWare I applied my experience from the iSCSI Target and VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) we built at LeftHand Networks, to build the Software defined iSCSI Target for ESX. While at VMWare I gained insights into modern virtualization software, and remained a fan and champion of the ESX Virtualizer to this day.

Distinguished Engineer

NexGen Storage
2011 - 2016

IO Journaling (With Mirror) and SSD Data Store Management
Clustered Storage Device Management Infrastructure
REST API Implementation on top of a Clustered Object Management Database
IO Performance and Scalability
iSCSI Target Implementation
Inline De-Duplication Engine
Patents: #10275351,#10891054,#10866742

In 2011 I left VMWare to join two of my previous LeftHand Networks Co-Founders (Kelly Long and John Spiers) to start NexGen Storage, a hybrid-storage array play. We were one of the first players in the industry to release a high density disk array with a flash acceleration layer which allowed us to outperform significantly more expensive storage arrays from established vendors like EMC and Netapp at a fraction of the price.

In 2013, after just 3 years since we started. NexGen Storage was acquired by FusionIO. FusionIO was later acquired by SanDisk, and in 2015 NexGen Storage spun out as an independent company. Then a year later NexGen Storage was acquired by Pivot3 and my journey at NexGen finally came to an end.

Staff Engineer

DigitalOcean
July 2016 - Present

Storage Product Development
Responsible for DigitalOcean Volumes storage product
Key Technologies: Ceph, SSD/NVME Flash Storage, Go, gRPC, Micro Service Architectures, K8s

In 2016 I decided to join DigitalOcean as it was obvious that another shift in computing paradigms was beginning. The user base as a whole begun to move their workloads to the “Cloud”. This would mean that their data would move with them. It was an opportunity to look into and build solutions for the big data problems that were arising in the cloud space.

Today DigitalOcean provides a gamut of storage solutions , from VM attached SSD, to SAN based bulk storage, to S3 compatible Object Storage. We try to solve problems specific to customers from hobbyists, to independent developers, to SMBs.

The Tinkerers Philosophy

The Tinkerers Philosophy Outside of work, I like to tinker for my own personal enjoyment and learning. I’ve dabbled in a lot or random areas. From Pro Gaming, to Gardening, to Autocross, to maintaining my own highly available computing environment.

I’ve have been writing software for fun and profit since I was 11. And I continue that practice today. Software development is my LEGO bricks, where I get to make the bricks from scratch.

I’m a believer that learning is doing, and doing is learning. The more things you explore the more tools you gather in your own skills toolbox for future endeavors. This belief has led me down the path of learning the fundamentals behind technologies such as Software Defined Radio, USB Controllers, Machine Learning, Machine Vision, Haptic and EMG feedback, and other random assortments of techniques and technologies. I try to explore something new as often as I can, sometimes that results in great success and sometimes in a dead end, but never in disappointment.
The Book Shelf
These books have shaped my life, and created a never ending drive to seek out further insights.
Home Environment
The Home Lab

“Every Developer needs a HomeLab, No Exceptions!” - Everyone that has a HomeLab

Here are the specs of mine:

8 Raspberry Pi 4s running 2 Nomad Clusters. ( Prod and Dev Clusters )

The Clusters hosts custom built DHCP, DNS, GITHub Repos, CI/CD environments along apps/tools/docker containers I happen to be playing around with.

I deploy all my experiments into these clusters as the hardware has a mix of various devices attached. ( Such as Software Defined Radio Receivers, Intel Compute Sticks, etc )

2 NUCs

1 VMWare ESX

1 Ubuntu With QEMU and Docker Build Environments

2 Synology NASs Systems ( To keep all my things )

SuperMicro X10 Storage Servers ( 768GB of RAM, 24 SAS SSDs, 10GB Ethernet)

An assortment of network gear

Commercial Fibre Connectivity to the rest of the Internet.
The 5 Minute Journal

Taking inspiration from Tools of Titans, I built a personal journaling web-app to track my daily 5 minute journals, TODOs, and important things that show up in my Inbox.

I use my Journal to reflect on things I did in a given day, take down ideas for new projects, experiments, or software ideas/concepts I’d like to try out.

Incidentally, this is what is driving the content of this website.

The BOM: * From scratch GO Lang server code * Badger DB Engine * UIKit CSS Framework with custom theme * EasyMDE for the editor component
Midlife Crises?

It's always fun to do something unique

After wrapping up my time at LeftHand Networks, I decided to take a break and try something a bit different. Which led me to spending a bunch of time at a race rack with professional racing drivers and instructors to learn something completely impractical and get an SCCA racing certification. It was one of those experiences that never leave me. It’s also a great way to spend thousands of dollars on new tires.

Here is a video of myself running some laps at High Plains Raceway in a 2008 V8 BMW M3.

¹⁰⁄₁₀ would do it again. ;)

Hardware Hacking

Macro Keyboard

Using an Android tablet and a custom servlet application written in GO to control Mac applications.

Servlet runs as a toolbar application and serves a javascript based applet that will run on any device with modern web browser. (Another PC, Phone, Tablet, etc) In this case an old Nexus 9 tablet.

The servlet notifies the app and displays new macros whenever the foreground application changes automatically. Macros and Buttons are fully customizable within the applet, and new applications are automatically discovered. It turned out to be

Electromyography Experiments

Using the now defunct Myo EMG based arm band, I hacked together some code to control a simple Lego claw. It was a fun little divergence into the limitations of EMG input as it stands today. It’s was evident early on that the latency to detect and process the signal was going to be the limiting factor to realtime control.

A secondary part of the hack here was getting golang applications running on the LEGO mind storm bricks. The app running on the brick received commands from my MAC which was performing the signal analysis from the data stream of the Myo band. I’ve since used the Lego hack for other unrelated hacks.

RPI Zero Password Keeper

To experiment in what can be done using the RPI Zero USB ports in gadget mode I built a simple Password Manager.

The UI toolkit is from scratch GoLang code that renders to the micro LCD display. All the widgets seen in the demo are part of the UI toolkit.

Once unlocked you can select the password to send to any device attached to the RPI via USB Cable. ( The RPI pretends to be a keyboard )

I’ve since reused the UI and Widgets built here on other projects that utilize a variety of LCD Displays (Including E-Ink displays). Even when you give up on a concept, there is always something you can take away from it to use in NEW ideas.

Sometimes Failure
Other times Success

We’ve been tending a garden for 10+ years now. Sometime it works out great, sometimes it turns in to a huge disappointment, but it’s never not interesting.

And yes, before you ask, of course its automated. But there is more to growing food then a robot turning on the water.

Sebastian Sobolewski

Mon Jun 7 21:58:15 -0600 2021

It’s been a long time coming. I first built www.thirdmartini.com using a customized version of MediaWiki. It’s lasted for almost 20 years, but it’s time for a change. So welcome to my all new website. This site is built using a native GO Lang HTTP, custom templates and JavaScript. The CSS is a customized version of UIKit.

The application running here is an early release of my 5 Minute Journal project which aims to build a personal journaling/micro blogging and distributed social media service based around PGP Signatures.

More News and Updates coming on that soon. In the meantime a teaser:

Sebastian Sobolewski

About Me

Specialties

One Important Truth

Employment History

Software Engineer

Founder

Senior MTS, IP Storage Group

Distinguished Engineer

Staff Engineer

The Tinkerers Philosophy

The Book Shelf

Home Environment

The Home Lab

The 5 Minute Journal

Midlife Crises?

It's always fun to do something unique

Hardware Hacking

Macro Keyboard

Electromyography Experiments

RPI Zero Password Keeper

Sometimes Failure

Other times Success

Sebastian Sobolewski