About Me

Hello,

My name is Mălin and I am an IT specialist from Romania although I currently live in a heavenly place called the island of Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands, Spain.

In order for you to get to know me better, I am supposed to tell you the story of my life and keep it short (not that easy) so here it goes.

The beginnings

I got my first PC at the age of 12 back in 1996 and it was nothing like the hardware that I’m using today.

It was an old 8086 IBM PC running MS-DOS with a 40 MB hard-disk that was the size of a frying pan, literally.

The whole thing was huge, expensive and came with a very loud Epson matrix printer.

However, in ’90’s Romania, it was the best present a kid my age could get.

Since it did not support an operating system with a GUI (Windows 95 was already out at that time) I was forced to learn to use the computer from the MS-DOS terminal.

That was basically too much for a young kid so in order to better understand what I was going up against I started to buy books that would teach me the basics of programming.

By the time I was admitted to high-school where they also gave Computer Science classes I already knew how to use the computer, knew the basics of programming, built a handful of programs to resolve my math homework and knew all the hardware components of a PC after tearing apart my old IBM PC and rebuilding it from scratch.

By the end of 2000, I saved enough money, by doing summer jobs and whatnot in order to do a computer upgrade so I bought the parts one by one and build myself another PC with a Celeron CPU (Coppermine).

It was low-end and used the cheapest components available on the market, but it was a major upgrade for me as now I had a computer capable of running an operating system with a GUI.

Becoming Who I am

While being in high-school I also discovered the internet cafes, the Internet itself, the websites, Yahoo! mail, IRC and the Linux operating system.

A whole new world opened for me so throughout high-school I ended up spending most of my spare time and even skipping classes or replacing the Saturday night-out with a long-night in an internet cafe or online at home (dial-up was way cheaper at night) in order to learn new things.

I was already running a dual boot with Windows 2000 and Red Hat 6 at home and started doing LAN parties with my friends as soon as I got my hands on a state of the art EDGE modem which provided me with somewhat unlimited wireless internet everywhere there was coverage for it.

Doing the LAN parties wasn’t easy as there were few switches and practically no routers available on the market so I was using a homemade router that was basically a recycled Pentium I PC running Linux where I was routing everything using IPTables.

The vendor of the modem did not provide any Linux drivers so I had to do my research and learn how to compile kernel modules in Linux in order for my modem to work with my homemade router.

As I lived in a fairly small community, word got out quickly and soon several friends, local schools and local businesses asked me to help create routing solutions for their networks without having them buy expensive hardware that was very hard to find.

When I finished high-school I had learned English for 12 years and even did the Cambridge FCE and CAE courses so few weeks after taking the bachelor’s degree exam and getting my degree I also sustained an exam to get match my English level and got a degree that allows me to teach English to primary school children.

With my level of English, I was supposed to actually pursue a career as an English teacher but instead, I wanted to continue with Computer Science.

I had no real possibility to find a job in Computer Science at that time as, technologically speaking, Romania was still an undeveloped country at that time so I did different jobs, some technology related, other not, in order to be able to sustain myself, but I never gave up on my passion for IT.

Each time I had the opportunity to do something in IT, even if it meant staying up late after an exhausting day I took up the challenge and did several gigs that enabled me to learn more, improve myself, increase my portfolio and this made the people that surrounded me trust my technical skills and recommend me further.

Due to the experience and expertise that I had gained, 10 years later after getting my first PC I decided to open my very own IT support and consultancy company called Outfit-IT&C.

In the spring of 2007 and with financial help I managed to open my own store and repair shop after I had already been selling recycled and refurbished hardware on the local equivalent of eBay.

It was a pretty bold move considering that two previous repair shops went bankrupt before but I was ready to take my chances.

By that time I already built a personal brand in my hometown and shortly after I gained the trust of several local institutions and businesses which allowed my business to grow and defeat the odds.

However, since all good things must come to an end, due to increased fiscality and financial pressure and due to an unhealthy business climate combined with fairly low-profit margins I decided to put an end to my beloved project and closed down the business in the summer of 2010.

The glitch in the Matrix

As soon as I closed the office door for the last time and attended my last customer I got in the car and drove all the way across Europe to reach my dream destination, Mallorca.

Once I arrived here I knew it was practically impossible for me to land a job in the IT given the fact that I wasn’t speaking very well either of the local languages and had limited connections so just like after I finished high-school I took on whatever job I could find but kept on accepting gigs that had any association with my technical experience, expertise and skills just so that I can improve my portfolio and gain local trust.

From the summer of 2010 and until the spring of 2011 I had fixed a couple of websites, built some websites for local customers, built a series of websites for my own projects and learned a lot about web hosting, web servers, and the cPanel control panel.

My newly acquired skills allowed me to land a job a Lunarpages, some of California’s best web hosting companies which had over 150000 customers.

After taking their technical exam and scoring 15 out of 15 I was hired as a level 2 customer support technician and was put in charge of their Managed Shared Hosting department.

What happened next?

Well, since all that happened after I joined Lunarpages is part of my recent career and implies some in-depth details of the skills, experience, and expertise that I acquired by now I got it all covered in different areas of this website that I am linking below:

• Co-Founder & IT Specialist – Palma Solutions
• Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer – CriptoArea
• Systems Administrator – HostLabs
• IT Manager – (undisclosed company)
• IT Manager & Web developer – easyCut!
• Managed Hosting Team Lead – Lunarpages
• My other projects – aka The Side Hustle