that’s whacked

SEED

Wednesday, Sep 21. 2005  –  Category: Sun

this is about a week late, but oh well…

last week we had our SEED showcase, the end of year meeting for our SEED program (one of Sun’s mentoring programs, and how i met geoff, my mentor).

some highlights? roughly in order…

• hearing Tom Chalfant’s talk on PTS (Product Technical Support). i always wondered what this guy did.
• hearing Keith Whisnant talk about system telemetry (used in our big machines like the Starcat). i actually heard his talk at the UCSD recruiting event last year, but Keith is one of the more engaging speakers i’ve heard come out of our engineering departments. you can tell he’s really enthusiastic about his work.
• the panel of DEs (2), VPs (2), and director (1) talk about ‘how to become a Sun executive’. this one was really interesting. one of the questions i first asked geoff when we started our mentoring relationship was whether breadth or depth was more important in his career. he answered (if i recall correctly, i don’t have my notebook in front of me ATM) that both were necessary. this may not be surprising given he’s the DE of HR (his words, not mine). interestingly, the two DE’s (Shueling Chang-Shantz, Poorna’s mentor, and Mike Wookey) both answered resoundingly depth was more important. whereas the 2 VPs & director answered breadth, with certainly some depth in your area of expertise. so now the question for the SEEDlings is, do we follow the technical track (aspiring to become DEs) or follow the managerial track? tough choice… and one i’m sure i’ll blog about in the future.
• the tour of the Sunnyvale compute ranch. holy crap this place is cool. this is the datacentre of your dreams. clean rows of machines, neatly run cabling, one system admin, etc. etc. part of it is helped by a uniform architecture (all fairly homogeneous SPARC machines), and doing a focused task: job queues of EDA tasks. so not quite your general purpose compute ranch - but still pretty darn cool.
• Ron Goldman’s talk on open source at Sun.
• Radia Perlman’s talk on her encrypted file system.

i should blog more details i know, but maybe in the future… for now i’ve got to go get build 23 delivered..