Michael Hausenblas is a Developer Advocate for San-Francisco based startup Mesosphere. The company was founded in 2013 with headquarters in California. There is now an engineering office based in Hamburg, Germany and as of 2016, Mesosphere employ over 200 people worldwide.
Michael moved to Galway in late 2008 with his family. He started out his working life in Ireland as a Post Doc researcher at the DERI Research Institute, NUI Galway. “For four years I was in research and academia and then I left that field for my first industry job which was MapR, a Bay Area based startup”, says Michael. He made the move to Mesosphere in May of 2015.
Mesosphere specialise in commercial data centre infrastructure software called Data Centre Operating Systems (DC/OS ). It gives all companies the foundation they need to thrive in a software defined economy. Users can deploy a single platform for running everything that modern applications require – from Docker containers to big data systems, all on the same set of shared resources.
“Imagine you have a couple of machines and you want to enable developers to easily develop and deploy applications. So far, that has mainly been done through virtual machines and you had a strong divide between the operation folks that would look after the machines and the working machines...the product that we open sourced in April 2016, (DC/OS ), is allowing developers to easily write and test their applications and then also to put them into production with monitoring and logging”, Michael explains. “In a sense, it’s the next big thing after the virtualisation area that VMware and others kicked off”.
Michael’s role sees him travelling 80% of the time, the other 20% he worked from home and for January 2017 he was based in PorterShed. “My role is of Developer Advocate so I go out and help developers and those who use DC/OS to use it in a way that is most efficient for them. So I explain through demos and webinars and by speaking at conferences and giving training”.
Working from home, even for a short time was becoming a slight problem so Michael decided to look for a work space. “When I’m on a call with a user or customer and I have the kids arguing in the background and also my voice is not necessarily one that you would not hear through walls! So by being on a call I would annoy my family so at some point in time I said yes I really should look for some working space”.
Michael “immediately fell in love” with PorterShed. “With the environment, with the people, and I thought, yes, that’s where I want to be”. Michael explains that the benefits of working in a co-working space like PorterShed is not only the peace and quiet but also the collaboration and knowledge sharing between members. At lunch time or over coffee, members, not necessarily in the same core IT or same domain, often have not only interesting but really valuable discussions.
“So it’s being in a professional work space and also in a space where you can exchange thoughts with others and get new ideas and that’s really cool.”
PorterShed is a co-working space and innovation hub based on Eyre Square, Galway. It is the First building in the Galway City Innovation District. Visit portershed.com for more information.
