About me

I started my I.T. "career" as a teenager, fixing friends' 386s and 486s. I went to a liberal arts college in Wisconsin for Mathematics - Computer Science degree. First job out of college, I did 5 years of software development work implementing warehouse management systems (C, HP-UX/AIX, Oracle RDBMS & PL/SQL, Uniface). Then I moved to Seattle and never looked back. :) Spent 2 years at MSFT doing client-server & server-server protocol documentation as part of the DOJ anti-trust decree. PCAP, anyone? Spent 1.5 years at Real Networks doing QA & SDET work (Java / SOAP API). Spent 2 years at Cingular Wireless as a performance & stability testing analyst. That gig pretty much combines all of my I.T. experience as a developer, QA engineer, Unix/Linux hobbyist, Oracle DB performance engineering, and calculus under 1 umbrella. Then I spent the next 5 years on a senior team at AT&T doing performance engineering work as part of a high visibility performance incident response team. We tested and improved performance for 20+ applications of varying architectures -- web app, Java, EJB, asynchronous JMS, SOAP APIs, Tibco B/W, IP-TV offerings, on Solaris, WebLogic, WebSphere, iPlanet, JBoss, Windows Server / SQL Server, Linux, etc. We did core analysis, thread dumps / thread analysis, JVM profiling and tuning, SQL query tuning, kernel parameter tuning, etc. For a team that was built to field performance-related issues in production, we had improved the applications so much that I don’t remember having to deal with a single production issue in the last 3 years I was there.  So most of the time we mentor the junior analyst team on profiling and analysis techniques. I left AT&T looking for a challenge in performance engineering. I found my way to Disney, at a small engineering shop in Seattle called Disney Technology Solutions & Services. It’s a Linux, Java, and RESTful API shop. I spent 2 years there doing performance testing & engineering on a product called Disney ID. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you’ll be using it soon. Word on the street is that all Disney-owned franchises will be adopting Disney ID as their single-sign-on solution – Disney.com, Parks & Resorts, Cruises, Movie Studio, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, X-Men, Lucas Arts / Star Wars… Prior to coming to EMC, I had an offer to go lead a performance engineering team. I’m familiar with that road and know what’s down there. I prefer to challenge myself with the unknowns. I came to EMC-Isilon seeking a good challenge. Hobbies: rowing, sailing, road cycling, salsa dancing, yoga, SCUBA diving, Linux, network security, and video games (yes I’m old but I still play).