Retired Until Further Notice

RUFN. I can’t remember where I first saw this, I think on an ex-colleagues linked-in status(*1). Back in September I declared I was done with cube life and it didn’t take long before it was time to part company with Dell.

I’m at an important crossroads, starting to pack up my Austin home, and move to a new house my partner, Kate, and I are building just south east of Boulder CO. Kate is already living in Boulder, where we are partners in Boulder Bodyworker.

So it seemed like an appropriate time to take some time out, and start an exciting new phase of life for me. I’ll be keeping busy, while I don’t have any active movie or music projects at the moment, I am behind on working on a project for Tri Equal and also a member of the advisory board  of the Professional Triathlon Union and continuing generally as an activist in the triathlon community.

I’m available for consulting work in the new year, especially for small to medium sized businesses that want to get an insight or review of their technology strategy; a perspective and advice on working with open source; data center operations.

Otherwise I’ll post here as appropriate and see how things develop next year. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 

*1. Yeah I’m aware of the slang usage.

New Year, New Start

Something’s missing on Cathcarts Corner, for the first time in 22-years, there is no IBM in the center of my CV. I’ll be starting in a new position at Dell on Monday 12th of January, as a Director of Systems Engineering, and Distinguished Engineer.

I enjoyed my time at IBM enormously; I got to work with some great people, on some great development and customer projects. My time came to an end though in Power Systems and more recently, data center networking.

In IBM, I’d never been part of a traditional development organization, rather, as my long time mentor and good friend Adrian Walmsley once noted, a poacher turned game keeper.

In my last four years at IBM, every project I’ve worked on has been subject to major compromise, cut-back and delays to accommodate another part of the IBM business, and I found that too frustrating.

My first project in IBM Power Systems was a great learning lesson. We spent 5-months looking at the software requirements for the follow-on processor to the p6. Presented with two processor designs, in the end we decided to go with the obvious one that built on the existing p6 chip, rather than a radical, highly multithreaded alternative.

After that, I failed to get any real software interest, either as platform function, packaging or, importantly in systems, or platform management function. Although some of my core recommendations are being built for the next generations of servers, it was obvious that the Power Systems team were still maniacally focused on dominating the Unix hardware performance at the cost of almost everything else.

I’ve no idea how different things will be at Dell. Unlike IBM Systems Group who have to solve every problem on four different architectures, and for a dozen or so unique machine type-models, Dell have their own challenges. I’m looking forward to helping solve them.

CV as a cloud tag

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net