Our September Bitnami Power User: Bob Stolzberg

We sat down with Bob Stolzberg of CenturyLink, a Principal Engineer (and avid fan of Bitnami's JBoss and Tomcat Blueprints) whom we worked with closely during our Bitnami Blueprints launch on the CenturyLink Cloud. After learning about our ‘Power Users’ monthly feature he contacted our COO directly to express how much he loves Bitnami resources. Naturally, we jumped at the chance to offer Bob our September Power User spot!

Bob is the ultimate evangelist. If there is ever a chance to utilize our web apps and stacks on a daily basis around the CenturyLink office he is the first one to recommend us. Check out a helpful blog post he recently authored, “Spinning Up Servers and Performance Monitoring in Minutes.”

He kindly got on the phone to walk our team through CenturyLink’s amazingly optimized Cloud Platform where our Bitnami Blueprints live. It’s incredibly easy for CenturyLink fans to navigate and deploy Bitnami Blueprints on their cloud platform, which made them a natural fit for a Bitnami partnership. The Bitnami Team is stoked to present Bob’s Power User Q&A. Read on and learn more about one of our favorite CenturyLink engineers, Bob Stolzberg:

What is your occupation? 

Principal Engineer at CenturyLink

What are your hobbies? 

In my spare time I enjoy hunting, fishing, metal detecting and spending time with my family.

Why did you start using Bitnami, and for what purposes? 

I started using Bitnami to automate the installation and configuration of a stack through Blueprints on the CenturyLink Cloud. A developer can rapidly ‘spin-up’ a LAMP stack (for example) in a low-cost environment, craft a blueprint that calls the Bitnami Blueprint as a base (everything is scalable and interactive), and have their customer information automatically configured every time. It’s very apparent that, much like CenturyLink, Bitnami is focused on speed and productivity.

What projects are you currently working on? 

Lots. :) Recently, I was involved in the task of helping to integrate Bitnami Blueprints with the CenturyLink Cloud. The magic of [CenturyLink’s] control panel is that you can easily/quickly configure and download Blueprints in under 1 minute. It was a fun project to work on as I’m a personal fan of both.

Do you have any favorite stacks/apps in the Bitnami Library? 

LAMP, MEAN, WAMP, Magento, Piwik, WordPress. Most recently I deployed Piwik to share project updates with a small team of developers and contractors inside CenturyLink.

How do you evangelize the Bitnami brand to peers/friends? 

I tell all of my friends and coworkers about Bitnami whenever I’m provided the opportunity. Just makes life simple and incredibly easy to install software.

We love to hear hear from our users, and we would love to hear about your personal experience with Bitnami as well. Feel free to reach out to us, and you might just be the next Bitnami Power User!

Our August Bitnami Power User: Nick McElligott

We’re excited to announce our August ‘Bitnami Power User', Nick McElligott! Nick went from having little to no backend server knowledge to CTO in a matter of months. He uses Bitnami as a resource to explore different installation environments and experiment with server setups.

Nick is an evangelist for Bitnami, not only because we make server software easy to use, but also because we make a wide variety of applications available on many different platforms and back it up with solid documentation and customer support.

Our support team is all about great user experience, so we love when people ask for help or advice! If you ever have a question about one of our stacks, visit the Bitnami community page and we’ll help you out ASAP.

Read on to learn more about Nick’s experience:

What is your occupation? 

Right now I'm an IT Consultant. I am a consulting CTO for a few small companies (all under the same ownership) and consult for my previous full time job in a full stack dev role.

What are your hobbies? 

• beer 
• basketball (especially NBA Spurs, and NCAA KU - rock chalk!)
• blacksmithing (shout out to watersidemetalart.org) 
• juggling and unicycling 
• bar hopping
• traveling 
• Indian food 
• programming (javascript is my favourite atm)

How would a novice programmer best use Bitnami as a resource? 

Most of the resources and tutorials on the internet are focused on front end (HTML/CSS/JS) and back end (PHP/Python/Ruby/C#/Java/DB etc) development. There are very little great tutorials on backend server stuff like how to get going with Linux install/setup/usage/concepts, the command line usage, Apache installation/setups/best use, MySQL install/setup and general server management, backups, monitoring, and architecture etc. All that stuff is usually learned on the job with experience. It’s hard to teach from a video and hard to learn without actually doing it and going through it all - something that most people would find prohibitive and not worth the payoff. 

When I got my first job at Spark Digital, I hadn’t touched any servers. I was thrown in the deep-end and was the only programmer in the whole building. Initially the existing sites were setup on shared hosting environments where we had little control over the environment. Within 6 months we had decided that we wanted to move over to a VPS provider and discovered Amazon. Since I didn't have any experience, we looked to Bitnami.

How did Bitnami fulfill your needs and where did you first hear about us? 

Bitnami has a billion different server images for all kinds of different products and services. However I would expect that most users don't use a fraction of all the different images available. Most people are in an industry and do a specific type of thing. Much of the value I got from Bitnami was that you could trust that the images were setup in a best way possible, documentation is amazing, and your support team goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Your Support Team really pushed me over the edge to fully love Bitnami. I can't tell you the amount of times they have saved me. It’s honestly insane. I'd love to see how many emails have been sent back and forth between us. The team was awesome, knowledgeable, intelligent, understanding and so much more. Please tell your support team that they are amazing, and if it weren't for all their hard work, I'd simply be a front end dev, not a full stacker.

What projects are you currently working on? 

Personally- I've been looking into RFID stuff using a RaspPi and using a LAMP backend. I may even take a look at switching over to a MEAN stack. RFID is such an empty market, and there are so many opportunities there, its exciting. Other RaspPi stuff and home automation is another area where I have interest. 

Professionally- I've just started playing with Visual Studio and C#, its a lot of fun. Working with a full fledged IDE has been interesting, but playing with a C based lang has been great.

Do you have any favorite stacks/apps in the Bitnami Library? 

Nothing in particular. I'm more familiar with a LAMP stack though.

We love to hear hear from our users, and would love to hear about your personal experience with Bitnami, as well. Feel free to reach out to us, and you might just be the next Bitnami Power User!