Meet a Helpful Human – Andrej Walilko

Responsive, helpful, and dedicated in ways automation simply can’t be. We’re your team.

Every month, we recognize one in all our Most Helpful Humans in Hosting®. 

After a childhood in Detroit, Andrej Walilko moved to East Lansing to attend Michigan State University, graduating with a Japanese Language degree. Early exposure to the sector of tech got here through Walilko’s father, who worked on computers, did Windows migrations for General Motors, and was an early adopter of the house computer (the family had an IBM 8086).

Now, Walilko is the Migration Project Manager at Liquid Web, where he also contributes helpful articles on hosting and migration to the Liquid Web Blog. 

My mother-in-law heard concerning the company and that it was a wonderful place to work. I already had some friends working there, and so they beneficial I apply. I put in my application for General Support. A starting knowledge of vim and a friendly demeanor helped my interview, and I got a call with a proposal before I left the car parking zone.

I benefit from the hosting sector due to the variability of elements that it encompasses. People curious about networking, hardware, software development, programming, and troubleshooting can all work under one roof. This makes for a uniquely collaborative environment at Liquid Web that lets us brainstorm how you can best serve our customers—together. 

There are such a lot of exciting projects to explore at Liquid Web. If there’s something that you simply’re curious about, you may likely discover a collaborator. Where else are you able to find other individuals who wish to construct a physical networking test environment, develop a simple-to-install server load balancing solution, or deep dive into cPanel backups to squeeze every byte out of storage? All of us share a passion for tech, in addition to for coming up with the very best solution for the clients we serve.

I really like how relaxed the company culture has been. Everyone has some bearing on the general nerd culture, which supplies a superb base to construct internal relationships from and keeps everyone grounded.

From board games to comic book movies, cars to keyboards… Liquid Web is stuffed with passionate people. It’s a part of what makes us The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting®. 

Liquid Web is a really understanding workplace. The supervisors and managers understand the workloads and the simpler or more complex work types because they often began within the trenches as Support Techs and moved up the ladder internally. This form of deep understanding of the work being done allows higher internal prioritization of projects that concentrate on the very best customer outcomes. 

I’m really very happy with the cPanel to cPanel migration scripting that I assembled during my time on that team. The migration script led us to slingshot our volume and migration consistency through the roof. It also helped make a more complete investigation and compatibility matching, making each migration for each customer just nearly as good because the last, irrespective of who’s handling it. This process gets repeatability and consistent quality between migrations since the scripting handles the essential work, letting the technician make the higher-level decisions.

I can not help but smile after I can expediently help someone in dire need. I can recall greater than a couple of occasions where a customer needed to get their website back from a rogue developer or was given lower than 24 hours notice to vacate their old host, and I used to be capable of get them on board and live in hours, and even minutes. Giving someone that incredible experience as their first contact with anyone at Liquid Web makes lifelong customers. 

I’ve established myself as someone who can plan out a fancy server move. And regardless that I have not been on the migrations team for a while, I still get questions on migrations, which is flattering. I’m still doing migrations, but at a project level, planning out and guiding a project team through larger-scale migrations of 1000’s of servers.

While web server tuning is a more tedious process, MySQL tuning for responsiveness and speed is amazingly straightforward. The most effective thing to do is put all your databases into RAM (if you might have enough). This involves changing just one or two settings.

My side hustle is rental properties, and I spend plenty of time working on house projects for these properties. I’ve amassed skills in quite a couple of trades through that endeavor: woodworking, cabinetry, plumbing, electrical, even working on steam boilers.

It is a tie between Recent Yankee Workshop, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, and Are You Being Served?

I feel that Travis McElroy (of MBMBAM fame) and I could have a rollicking dinner together.

You’ll be able to follow Andrej Walilko on LinkedIn.