what I do

Introducing Your SmartOS Community Manager

September 14, 2011

About Me I’m Deirdré Straughan. A great deal about my personal and professional life is available on my site, Countries Beginning with I. I have been a community manager since long before the title existed, first for the Italian startup I worked for in Milan, then for Adaptec (when it bought us), then for Adaptec’s software spinoff, Roxio. The website I designed for Roxio [...]

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New Videos: The Gregg Performance Series

May 4, 2011

Working for Joyent, I continue to create lots of technical video (~32 hours of edited material to date). Most recent examples, here, are the start of a series I’m doing with Brendan Gregg (author of the DTrace book). In the course of his research to make these videos, Brendan even made some surprising discoveries about [...]

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node.js Community Event: Rough Cut Videos

March 3, 2011

Joyent hosted a node.js community event at our San Francisco offices the other evening, in which Ryan Dahl announced a new version of node.js, and Brendan Gregg showed some amazing stuff you can do with Joyent Cloud Analytics on your no.de hosted site to understand what’s going on in your node.js app. For more details on [...]

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Joyent End User Tutorial Videos

February 14, 2011

Wondering what I’m up to in my new job? As mentioned, I work for Joyent, which does cloud computing. In addition to and as part of my job as Director of Technical Training, I’m doing a lot of video (well, what did you expect?) including live streaming events like a talk by Bryan Cantrill and [...]

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My New Job

December 26, 2010

^ Ben Rockwood, Deirdré Straughan, Brendan Gregg I received email from a concerned reader saying: “when a writer stops writing, one of two things is happening: – you’re blissfully happy, too happy to attempt to put it into words – you’re utterly miserable, too miserable to find the energy to put it into words” As [...]

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The Faces of Sun

November 29, 2010

I’ve been meaning for a long time to make a video tribute to the amazing people of Sun Microsystems. It has been my honor and privilege to work with some of the finest minds in this industry (or any industry), many of whom I also got to film at Sun conferences and other events worldwide. [...]

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How the DTrace Book Got Done

September 12, 2010

In the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time on the DTrace book: copy editing, managing the review process, and (ongoing) marketing – keep an eye out for video! Also provided care and feeding and a quiet place to work for one of its authors, Brendan Gregg, shown above. Brendan and co-author Jim [...]

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Why Film Engineers?

August 7, 2010

^ The Perf Trio: Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg, and Roch Bourbonnais In the last three and a half years, working for Sun Microsystems and now Oracle, I have produced over 300 video assets, ranging in length from 10 minutes to 3 hours. Most of this material is software engineers talking about deeply technical topics. By [...]

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“Delivering Happiness”

June 13, 2010

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose When I heard Tony Hsieh speak at SxSWi in 2009, I was only vaguely aware of Zappos.com, and that mostly because of their advertising and wifi sponsorship in Denver airport. I couldn’t imagine wanting to buy shoes online, so never bothered to look at the site. [...]

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Woodstock School Memories: The Student Survival Kit

May 23, 2010

This was the first manual/user guide I ever wrote, a student handbook for Woodstock School, incorporating the school’s rules and policies, survival tips, a fill-in class schedule and diary pages. I wanted to make the rules easier to understand, and more accessible, by applying simpler, clearer language and a sense of humor. Apparently it worked. [...]

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Gallery: Tech Days 2010 Hyderabad

March 25, 2010
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The Videoblogging Manual

March 9, 2010

Many of the posts on my Sun blog (now moved here) are tips and how-to’s, originally published in no particular order, that add up to the beginnings of a videoblogging manual. So here’s a table of contents, along with some notes which will eventually be developed into posts of their own. I’ll update this one [...]

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The Twitter Diaries: 2010-01-28 CO

January 28, 2010

(In reverse chron order, sorry!) Jan 28, 2010 @KathySierra a lot of us prefer keyboards, though. I find handwriting painful and screen-touching slow. And I type VERY fast. RT @wanderingitaly: Mmmm. RT: @ContextItaly: Jewish Cuisine in Rome event May 17, led by the wonderful Katie Parla http://bit.ly/9b24Xw @nonstick that is very true. @nonstick I don’t [...]

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The Twitter Diaries: 2010-01-18: SF, CO

January 18, 2010

used to own and love this poster, pretty sure I didn’t pay this much for it at the zoo itself http://bit.ly/65BfFK @KathySierra the trick is to look like you’re sharing all, while actually concealing much. @nonstick that was more like Not Safe for Human Eyeball Consumption @vdotw hey, mine came with a warning. Back at [...]

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Ben Rockwood & Deirdré Straughan: A Conversation at LISA ’09

December 10, 2009

download for iPod A conversation about LISA, conferences in general, open source communities, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Sun culture, Sun personalities, the value of video, social media, the old days on CompuServe, supporting customers online, why video instead of text blogs, measuring online impact, Facebook, Twitter, bit.ly, the next big thing in social media, technical education…

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GHC09: Becoming a Person of Influence

November 30, 2009

Still trying to catch up with my notes from the talks I attended at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in October… Jo Miller was a very popular presenter at GHC08, so was invited back this year to speak on Becoming a Person of Influence. Jo, an Aussie with a somewhat confused accent [...]

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Student Party at SC09

November 22, 2009

^ attendees filling in surveys As sponsors of the SC09 Broader Engagement initiative, and because we gave such a great party last year,  we were asked to sponsor a party again this year for students attending SC09. For a number of reasons we weren’t able to commit to this until the last minute, so thanks [...]

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The Twitter Diaries: 2009-11-22: Portland

November 22, 2009

^ Portland autumn RT @italylogue: Just had a fantabulous dinner at Ping in Old Town Portland with @DeirdreS & the husband. – definitely wonderful! Thanks! # oh, great. I have a video to publish, and our blogging platform is down. # Video: Brendan Gregg on DTrace | Sun Learning eXchange http://bit.ly/2vusEk # waiting to finish [...]

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Brendan Gregg at FROSUG, Oct 2009

November 11, 2009

^ social media in action: you can see the video stream going out on the right On October 29th, Brendan Gregg spoke at the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group meeting on “Little Shop of Performance Horrors” (a Halloween theme). Yes, we taped it. All photos from this set:

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The Twitter Diaries: 2009-11-08: Baltimore

November 8, 2009

^ Ben Rockwood’s BoF session on “ZFS in the Trenches” at LISA ’09. at DIA. So what else is new? # What a cruddy old plane. Why dud I choose United? # @davewiner the nice thing about Twittef is, if soneone is boring, you can just quit following. Dunno why anyone wd bother to bitch [...]

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