A working life in technology: writing, people, projects and ideas.
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My career in tech spanned 40 years, starting with the part-time jobs that helped pay my way through college. Over my lifetime I’ve worked for four startups (Team Technologies, Incat Systems, TVBlob, Joyent), five major multinationals (Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Ericsson, Amazon, Intel), and a couple of mid-sized companies (Adaptec, Roxio), in and from and for multiple countries (US, Italy, Sweden, Australia). Not counting all the days and hours I worked remote from various travels and vacations. And the years I worked freelance. I retired in February, 2023.
Brief professional bio
Tech industry veteran with 40 years’ experience and deep expertise across a wide range of technologies, companies, roles, and geographies.
Product experience: consumer applications and devices, cloud services, enterprise software, kernel features, observability, cloud services, open source.
Toolkit: messaging, content marketing, inbound marketing, personas, marketing campaigns, technical writing and editing, websites, blogs, mailing lists, communities, all aspects of events, public speaking, social media, curriculum development, and training.
Content: wrote or edited over 4,000 pages of published technical books, filmed over 400 technical videos, written or edited hundreds of technical blog posts, and organized dozens of technical meetups, conferences, and conference talks. Managed content teams.
early 1980s
1988
1991
How I Became an Italian (Tech) Journalist
Writing portfolio
- At Your Service
- Cosa ci porta il signor Aldus
- Una cura per solitudine
- FrameMaker
- DTP che abbuffata
- Il mondo in un tombino
- Suoni del futuro
- Dire salve alla salute
- Byte a Milioni
- Un libro tutto di bytes
- I lievi libri digitali
- I giorni di Intermedia
- CD-Rom pronto in tavola
- Il primo CD sugli ultimi animali
- Tracce dai cieli di Boston
- Intermedia
- La mela del peccato
- Doors of Perception
- Minimizing the Multisession Muddle
- InfoWorld award
- Easy-CD brochure early 90s
- Writing Portfolio
How I Got My (First) Job in Italy
Incat Systems – From 1991 until its acquisition by Adaptec in 1995, I worked for Incat Systems in Milan and then California (yes, it was a long commute). I’ve also written about Fabrizio Caffarelli, the brilliant, mecurial founder of Incat and sometime friend.
1994
…and later: “family” photos with Incat Systems colleagues in Milan and California, some of whom are still friends, others I’ve lost touch with.
1995
Incat Systems was acquired by Adaptec, for whom I then worked as a contractor for about five years. I mostly worked from my home in Milan, traveling four times a year to spend weeks at a time with my colleagues in the Bay Area home office. Things I did while with Adaptec included:
Initiated and moderated the Adaptec CD-R discussion list, a then-innovative approach to communications between a company and its customers.
Weekly newsletters launched in 1998, the largest list had 170,000 subscribers by 2001. These also encouraged reader responses and input – a pre-blogs example of online conversation between a company and its customers.
Monitored and responded in any online forums where our products were discussed. Eventually headed a small team which carried out these support activities.
For the Adaptec website, was solely responsible for all CD-R content: development and management of technical and marketing content, HTML, navigation design, information architecture. Managed an internal team and outside contractors. Designed and managed implementation of Web applications. This content brought in 70% of Adaptec’s overall website traffic.
All this moved to Roxio.com in November, 2000. I was part of the management team which chose and implemented ATG Dynamo as the application server and personalization platform, and Interwoven’s TeamSite for content management.
Had overall responsibility for content and community on Roxio.com, led the content and applications team which developed and launched the new Roxio site for the company spin-off in May, 2001.
1996
1998
1999
Adaptec in Seville – In the summer of 1999 I got to attend a get-together of Adaptec Software sales people and partners in Seville, Spain. I don’t remember the names of most of these people (except for Big John Heckethorn) but I do remember that we all had a lot of fun, particularly with a treasure hunt involving teams in jeeps cruising around the hills. There was also flamenco dancing.
2000
CeBit – I went to Germany to help staff the Adaptec/CeQuadrat booth at CeBit, at the time the largest tech conference in Germany (and maybe all of Europe). CeQuadrat was another small CD-recording software company that Adaptec had bought, so we had acquired a(nother) bunch of German colleagues – I don’t remember whether this happened before or after Adaptec bought Toast, the most popular CD-recording software for Mac. I made friends among both teams, some of whom remain in touch today.
Roxio party – We had a fancy party to celebrate the spinoff of Roxio from Adaptec. Apparently we put on headgear to dance “YMCA.” The guy on the floor was the new CEO, Chris Gorog, whose claim to fame was that he’d produced a few little-known movies. But he was a Hollywood guy, and the Adaptec board rather grandiosely saw Roxio as a media company. Um, yeah… sorta.
2001
2005
2007
^ Intervista al RomeCamp, a cura di Elisabetta Locatelli per dolmedia.tv.
Joined Sun Microsystems, initially as a contractor, then an employee. Accomplishments included:
Devised and managed social media strategies to encourage Sun use of blogs, Twitter, etc. to promote and communicate about our technologies. Analysis and strategies for specific blogs led to increased posting and traffic. For example, translation led to page view increases of 200-2000% in China, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and Spanish-speaking countries.
Filmed, produced and published over 200 hours (300 items) of video on highly technical topics, garnering >180,000 total views (to 2010). Translation and subtitlingincreased global reach of these videos. Taught workshops to develop video skills among colleagues worldwide.
Social media production (video streaming, live tweeting) to increase global reach/participation in events.
Developed and managed technical content on websites, wikis, and blogs.
Planned and managed community events, including Sun’s Open Storage Summits, student events at ISC, Sun participation in OSCON, LISA, SNIA SDC and other conferences.
Constantly gathered and analyzed statistics to evaluate the effectiveness of all of the above.
August
Sun Broomfield – This was my first visit to a Sun Microsystems campus, when Dan Maslowski brought me on as a contractor in the summer of 2007. I flew to Colorado from London, after dropping off my daughter Rossella on her way to do her senior year of high school at Woodstock. While I was there, Sun held a talent show among its employees, and a few other things happened.
September
SNIA SDC – the first conference I filmed for Sun
October
Web Women Weekend, Lecco
2008
March
I attended OpenCamp in Rome, which was held in a mostly recovered public space, the former slaughterhouses of Rome, parts of which are interestingly decorated with graffiti.
May
Open Source Grid & Cluster Summit, Held in Oakland. I think I went primarily to film Dan Templeton giving a workshop.
Sun Community One – Community One took place in San Francisco and was a Big Deal, including custom illustrations from Hugh MacLeod who was also at the time a Big Deal. Yes, that’s Ian Murdock, who had joined Sun a year earlier to try to Linux-ify Solaris. San Francisco
The OpenSolaris Developers’ Summit, Santa Cruz
June
After seeing my daughter graduate from Woodstock School, I visited Sun’s engineering center in Bangalore, to meet colleagues – and film them! I hadn’t been to Bangalore since 1980, when it was a sleepy little town. No more! The ride in from the new airport (just opened last week) took an hour and a half, the first part of it very fast on a brand-new six-lane highway. Then we hit city traffic… I stayed at a hotel within easy walking distance from Sun’s office — if you know how to get there. I didn’t, so colleague Sanjeev Bagewadi came to get me – the route is impossible to explain (I mapped it for the benefit of other Sun travellers). Though much changed since my previous visit in 1980, Bangalore was still delightfully green.September
October
Sun offices in Eagan, MN – I visited my colleagues in Eagan, Minnesota, to capture on film their various expertise (don’t ask me to explain what they do, I stay behind the camera for a reason). There were several other visitors, so the Eagan folks organized a traditional Minnesota potluck, with traditional Minnesota foods such as Mexican lasagna, jello salad, and other hot dishes. Those Tater Tots took me right back to childhood…
November
Sun’s SC08 Student Party, Austin – The SuperComputing conference every year attracts computer science students from all over the world who participate in various ways: as volunteers, as competitors in things like the Cluster Challenge, as part of SC’s Education Program, and in a Broader Engagement initiative, run by Livermore Labs’ Computing Applications & Research Department. It’s a large and fascinating group, comprising students and educators from all over the world: China, India, Nigeria, Italy…
We wanted to give these students – current and future HPC developers – an introduction to Sun and our OpenSolaris HPC software developers’ stack. But they’re already working hard this week, so we didn’t want to lecture them. Instead, we threw a party!
Video collection (70)
- Flash Performance in Storage Systems
- dtrace.conf – 11:29am, NFSv3 and iSCSI providers
- dtrace.conf – 11:44am, DTrace for hardware
- dtrace.conf – 3:01pm, Erlang (continued)
- dtrace.conf – 3:13pm, Instrumenting Adobe AIR
- dtrace.conf 1:03pm – Zones & DTrace
- dtrace.conf 1:58 pm – Jarod Jenson
- dtrace.conf 2:52pm – Erlang
- dtrace.conf 7:25pm – Apple Port of DTrace
- dtrace.conf 11:17am – Demos
- dtrace.conf 3:43pm – HotSpot Runtime & Java
- dtrace.conf 12:40pm – VMWare VProbes
- dtrace.conf 4:24pm – PostgreSQL: Looking Under the Hood with Solaris
- dtrace.conf 4:44pm – PostgreSQL Provider
- dtrace.conf 5:09pm – Distributed DTrace
- dtrace.conf 6:21pm
- Invitation to Oracle OpenWorld
- FAST WIP- Filebench
- ZFS as a Root File System
- The Solid-State Storage Revolution
- Introducing Thorsten Freauf
January
- SNIA EPA Green Storage Workshop – 3
- OpenSolaris
- eDiscovery
- SNIA EPA Green Storage Workshop – 4
- SNIA EPA Green Storage Workshop – 1
- SNIA EPA Green Storage Workshop – 2
February
April
- Talking About COMSTAR at SNW
- Owls at Sun’s Broomfield Campus
Today the owls are sitting on a window ledge outside an office in BRM05. Apparently they aspire to careers in engineering. Or else, as a colleague said, they’re keeping an eye on the mouse…
May
- COMSTAR
- The Open Storage Revolution
- Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference: Voice of the Community BoF
- GoGames at the Open Solaris Developers’ Summit
June
August
September
- Talking Open Storage with OurStage
- Interview with Evan Powell of Nexenta
- Talking Open Storage with OurStage – 2
- ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 1
- ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 2
- ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 3
- The Shopkeeper – a Scalability Story
- Interview with Paddy Srinivasan of Zmanda
- Storage in the Cloud: Open Storage Summit
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 5
- ZFSin the Trenches Part 7
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 6
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 4
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 3
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 2
- Open Storage Summit Party
- Mike Shapiro & Steve O’Grady
November
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 1
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 2
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 3
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 4
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 5
- ZFS Workshop at LISA Part 6
- Magician Scott Tokar for Sun Microsystems at SuperComputing
SuperComputing 08, held in Austin, Texas, was a huge show and a huge effort for many of us at Sun, especially Rich Brueckner. The Sun booth was humming, attractions included Scott Tokar, a magician, and Rich’s Java Chopper, complete with biker chicks.
- HPC Austin Bojanic
- HPC Austin xVM Pai
- HPC Using Sun Studio in HPC and Education
December
2009
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – poster session on video, Ariza. Also interviewed about video and community for Ed & Ashley’s 5 Minute Show.
March
The First Colorado Front Range Girl Geeks Dinner, Broomfield,
South by Southwest, Austin – The first and only time I attended this famous conference, seeing and meeting some people I already knew, some I didn’t, some I admired, some I didn’t.
May
CommunityOne & OpenSolaris User Group Bootcamp, San Francisco
June
Innovating Employee Engagement/Executing Social Media for Internal Communications, Chicago – invited speaker on Utilizing Social Media Tools to Build Engagement and Community
FISL – Porto Alegre, Brazil – I went to Porto Alegre, Brazil, to help staff a Sun booth (along with many other people, a bunch of whom became friends) at FISL, billed as the world’s largest open source conference. Was a co-speaker on Using Video to Communicate About Open Software
July
New Zealand Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand – series of presentations on social media and video
Kernel Conference Australia, Brisbane
Community Leadership Summit and OSCON – I returned from south of the equator directly to the Bay Area, to attend the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON, held that year for the first and only time in San Jose rather than Portland. I didn’t get many photos or notes – was too busy listening, talking, and meeting people. I did do a bunch of fun stuff for Sun, including conversations between a puppet named Jack Adams and several Sun engineers. I also led a session on videoblogging which 14 people attended. San Jose
October
Oracle Open World, We were almost Oracle employees by this time. “Open” is a misnomer – there is nothing open about Oracle. San Francisco
Front Range OpenSolaris user group meeting, Broomfield
November
Solaris Security Summit at LISA, We ran a Solaris Security Summit as an adjunct to LISA 2009, in Baltimore. I scored a cool t-shirt. – Baltimore
Video collection (130)
- Kernel Conference Australia Pramod Batni
- ZFS Crypto
- Introducing KNR
- Introducing Swathi
- Introducing Sreekanth “the serious version”
- Introducing Pramod C Sambi C and Venkateswarlu
- Introducing Harish
- Brendan Gregg on DTrace Part 4
- Brendan Gregg on DTrace Part 3
- Brendan Gregg on DTrace Part 2
- Brendan Gregg on DTrace
- OpenSSO – A Jack Adams conversation with Pat Patterson
- Jack Adams Interviews George Wilson on ZFS
- OpenSolaris Security
- Auto Testing OS
- DevCon Caiman Part 1
- DevCon Caiman part 2
- DevCon Chime part ?
- DevCon Chime
- Protecting Oracle Applications with Built In Solaris SecurityFeatures
- Snow Falling on Sun’s Broomfield Campus
January
- Thrilled in Boulder
- ZFS Discovery Day Total Cost of Ownership
- ZFS Discovery Day: Understanding the Technology
- Performance of the Hybrid Storage Pool
- ZFS Discovery Day- Demo
- ZFS Discovery Day- Demo pt 2
- ZFS Discovery Day Introduction by Graham Scattergood
February
- Nexenta, Open Storage, and Commercial Open Source
- Open Storage & ZFS in a Linux World 2
- Open Storage & ZFS in a Linux World 1
- ZFS, Cache and Flash
- SETI For The People: Addressing the Challenge of Massive Data Sharing
- Storage FMA
- Storage Re-Provisioning with COMSTAR
March
June
- Testing Applications with VirtualBox Software
- Solaris Device Drivers Part 2
- Solaris Device Drivers
- Becoming a ZFS Ninja Part 1
- Becoming a ZFS Ninja Part 2
- Probing Database Applications with DTrace 1
- Probing Database Applications with DTrace 2
- Measuring Performance with Sun Studio Tools
- Built-in Virtualization for OpenSolaris- Containers, Sun Logical Domains (LDOMs), and xen
- OpenSolaris Secure Deployment
- ZFS and COMSTAR
- FISLmedeiros mov
- FISL – Renato
- Entrevistas no FISL10 Ronaldo Prass e o GeJUn
- President Lula of Brazil Meets OpenSolaris
At FISL 10, Porto Alegre, Brazil, June 26, 2009.
- Networking in the Cloud: Crossbow’s Revolutionary Impact in a Virtualize World
- FISL Interview
A conversation on Radio Software Livre (FISL) about using video to communicate about open software. Bruno Souza interviews (and translates for) Deirdré Straughan and Aaron Newcomb.
July
- DTracing Your Website
- ZFS The Next Word Part 6
- ZFS- The Next Word Part 1
- ZFS- The Next Word Part 4
- Device Drivers for OpenSolaris Part 1
- Device Drivers for OpenSolaris Part 2
- KCA Pawel on GEOM
- KCA Boomer
- KCA Linux Kernel Security Overview
- x86 Fast Reboot and Panic Reboot
- KCA DTrace Round Table
- KCA Results of a Security…
- KCA Percy
- Nehalem and Solaris
- KCA David Gwynne
- KCA Crossbow for OpenSolaris Developers
- KCA Finding bugs in Open Source
- Kernel Conference Australia Closing – James McPherson
- KCA Panel discussion Secure
- Porting USB HID Device Drivers Between Linux and OpenSolaris
- Kernel Conference Australia: Panel Discussion on ZFS 1
- Kernel Conference Australia: Panel Discussion on ZFS 2
- Secure Software Engineering : In-Kernel Security
- How to survive as an Aussie Kernel Engineer
- Debugging and Diagnosing Interesting Kernel Problems
- Hardware & Software Fault Management Architecture
- OpenSolaris Security- The Cryptographic Framework
- OpenSolaris Security- Security and Solaris Containers
- OpenSolaris Security- Q&A
- OpenSolaris Security- Solaris Privileges
- Pramod Batni at Kernel Conference Australia
- ZFS The Next Word Part 5
- ZFS The Next Word Part 2
- ZFS The Next Word Part 3
- Jack Adams Goes Walkabout at OSCON
- Jack Adams and Nnenna Nwakanma of FOSSFA
- Using DTrace to Analyze Your Webstack
- Nick Solter on High Availability – a Jack Adams Interview
September
- OpenStorage Summit 09 Alex Barclay Neuroimaging Storage Landscape
- Stephen Tyree & Alex Barclay of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research
October
- Videoblogging Tips: Getting Good Sound at a Conference
- Videoblogging Tips: Camera Motion
- Videoblogging Tips: Filming Engineers
- Videoblogging Tips: Dressing for the Camera
- Network Virtualisation Using Crossbow Technology
- Optimizing and Managing Simulation Runs with Intel Flash & Oracle and MSC Software
- ZFS Internal Structures
- Using DTrace for GNOME Performance Analysis
- Implementing a simple SMF Service-2
- Implementing a simple SMF Service
- Network Virtualisation Using Crossbow Technology 2
- Oracle E-Business Suite on Sun Blades
- Little Shop of Performance Horrors – Trailer
- Little Shop Of Performance Horrors Part 1
- Little Shop Of Performance Horrors Part 3
- Little Shop Of Performance Horrors Part 2
- DevCon Source Juicer part 1
- DevCon Source Juicer part 2
- Oracle OpenWorld Glynn
- DevCon Dead Ends
- DevCon Dead Ends 2
November
- Solaris Security Summit Introduction
- ZFS Crypto: Data Encryption for Local, NAS and SAN part 2
- ZFS Crypto: Data Encryption for Local, NAS and SAN part 1
- Solaris Security Overview Part 2
- Solaris Security Overview 1
- Protecting Services with Built-In Solaris Security Features
- Kerberos Authentication for Web Security
- Hardware-Based Isolation and Security for Virtual Machine Network
- Thin Client Delivery for the Enterprise
- Multilevel Cluster
- Trusted Extensions & Demo
- Ben Rockwood & Deirdré Straughan- A Conversation at LISA ’09
- Rethinking Passwords
- Rethinking Passwords – Part 2
- OpenSolaris User Groups
December
2010
Employees Making Videos webinar for Communitelligence
January
Community Leadership Summit West, A local edition of the Community Leadership Summit. I didn’t take many pictures because I was too busy participating. I was also an unconference session leader
March
Sun Product Management Team meetings, MPK – I don’t remember now why we needed to get a bunch of people together in MPK or what, if anything, we accomplished. But it was fun!
The last Sun Tech Days – The final edition of Sun Tech Days was held in Hyderabad in March, 2010. After that, all events were Oracle-branded. This was my last big trip for Sun, and of course I jumped at any opportunity to go to India. I was amused to catch the above billboard on my way in from the airport. I had not met James Gosling at that point. When he was pointed out to me in the hotel café, he looked grumpy and unapproachable (not his usual style), and he quit Oracle soon after that.
April
NAB, Las Vegas
June
Workshop: The Changing Role of Technology Marketers – WITI Summit, Santa Clara,
August
Farewell, MPK – Sun’s Menlo Park headquarters had been emptying out for some time, and I spent a lot of that summer rounding up and giving away old Sun swag. We had a party with some of it.
filmed 3 Sun execs doing a podcast
October
Oracle Open World – I worked at this event even though I was very, very ill and should have been on medical leave. A lot of the gallery below is me trying to get the perfect shot of two of my favorite men in tech, Brendan Gregg and Rick Ramsey. San Francisco
November
LISA – I think this was the last event I worked for Sun/Oracle – I resigned right after Thanksgiving later that month. Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro gave a birds-of-a-feather session , the only video that survives from that event (though I had filmed an entire day of Solaris-related talks). Santa Clara
, the only video that survives from that event (though I had filmed an entire day of Solaris-related talks). Santa ClaraThe Faces of Sun farewell video
Video collection (53)
- The Faces of Sun
- ZFS Log Devices
- ZPool Split
- Sun Tech Days Hyderabad Sharat
- Sun Tech Days Hyderabad Sharat Chander part 2
- George Wilson: ZFS Triple Parity RAID Z
- ZFS Pool Recovery
- ZFS System Duty Cycle Scheduling Class
- ZFS Pool Split
- ZFS Dynamic LUN Expansion
- Rick Ramsey on BigAdmin
- ZFS System Duty Cycle
- Introducing Solaris Cluster 3.3
March
- Introduction to the DTrace Book
- What’s in the DTrace Book?
- LUN Alignment
- Observing Your App and Everything Else it Runs on Using DTrace
- Observing Your App and Everything Else it Runs on Using DTrace 2
- Developing in a Multicore World
- Performance- The “Not a Problem” Problem
Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg, and Roch Bourbonnais discuss a type of performance issue that’s very difficult to troubleshoot: the problem that isn’t actually a problem.
- Performance Instrumentation Counters
- Performance Instrumentation Counters-2
- Problems Solaris Solves – 1 Managing File Systems Effectively
- Problems Solaris Solves – 3 – Zones
- Problems Solaris Solves – 4 – Diagnosing Live Systems with DTrace
- Problems Solaris Solves – 2 – Monitoring and Managing Networks
- Securing Networked Services
- Getting Started with Solaris 7 Device Names & File Systems
- Getting Started with Solaris 6 Networking
- Getting Started with Solaris 5 System Services
- Getting Started with Solaris 4 Managing Software
- Getting Started with Solaris 3 Users
- Getting Started with Solaris 2 Where is Everything?
- Getting Started with Solaris 1 About Solaris
- Performance Experimentation
Brendan Gregg and Roch Bourbonnais share the thought process they use to troubleshoot system performance problems.
- Performance: Interrupts
- Developing in a Multicore World 2
August
- illumos: Forking is Healthy
- Solaris History: Crystal Springs and Telegraph Hill Conference Rooms
- Solaris History: Muir Woods Conference Room
September
October
November
2011
Video collection (14)
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency with DTrace 1
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency with DTrace 3
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency with DTrace 4
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency with DTrace 5
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency with DTrace 2
January
April
- Introduction to VMStat
- VMStat: The Columns
- Uptime
- mpstat Key Fields
- mpstat: All the Fields
- mpstat: Digging Deeper
October
November
2012
dtrace.conf – In April, 2012, I organized and ran the second-ever DTrace conference (the first had been held in 2008). I found the venue and sponsors, did all the logistics, live streamed and filmed the entire day’s proceedings. It was run somewhat unconference style, with Bryan Cantrill emceeing, so the final list of talks you see below emerged over the course of the day.
Perhaps my greatest feat for this conference was persuading the Oracle DTrace for Linux team to attend and speak!
Using Video to Communicate Technology, talk at FISL
January
April
NAB – I attended this with Jonas Thaler for the second time. Not sure what the excuse was, but the reason was that I wanted to go. As usually happens, I managed to make myself useful by introducing people to each other.
October
ZFS Day and illumos Day – Two days of conferences organized by me. These took place at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, deliberately on the same dates that Oracle Open World was being held next door at Moscone Center – I was surprised that Oracle hadn’t pre-emptively rented the Museum themselves.
Video collection (72)
January
- Getting Optimum Sound from a Consumer Camcorder
- Testing ZFS in illumos
- The Future of LibZFS Part 1
- The Future of LibZFS, Part 2
- The Future of LibZFS – Part 3
- ZFS Code Comments
- ZFS Backwards Compatibility Testing with ztest
- ZFS Feature Flags – Part 2
- ZFS Feature Flags – Part 1
- ZFS Feature Flags – Part 3
- Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor – 1
- Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor – 2
- Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor – 3
- Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor – 5
- Performance Analysis: new tools and concepts from the cloud
- Performance Analysis: new tools and concepts from the cloud 2
- Performance Analysis: new tools and concepts from the cloud 3
- Experiences Starting an Open Source Operating System
- Experiences Starting an Open Source Operating System 2
- Experiences Starting an Open Source Operating System 3
- Experiences Starting an Open Source Operating System 4
- Developing for illumos – 1
- Developing for illumos – 2
- Developing for illumos – 3
- Developing for illumos – 4
- Developing for illumos – 5
- Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor – 4
- Performance Analysis: new tools and concepts from the cloud 4
March
April
- A Carousel of DTrace
- dtrace.conf – User-Level CTF
- dtrace.conf – Dynamic Translators
- dtrace.conf – Control Flow & Language Enhancements
- dtrace.conf – Clang Parser for DTrace
- dtrace.conf – Visualizations
- dtrace.conf – Visualizations, Enabling Toolchain for Seamless USDT
- dtrace.conf – More Visualizations
- dtrace.conf – DTrace in node.js
- dtrace.conf – DTrace on Linux
- dtrace.conf – DTrace and Erlang
- dtrace.conf – ZFS Provider
- dtrace.conf – DTrace on FreeBSD
- dtrace.conf — Barriers to DTrace Adoption
July
- Max Bruning Presents on SmartOS at NOSIG
- Using Video to Communicate Technology
Me talking about what I do and why I do it that way.
- Performance Analysis: The USE Method
- Introduction to Git
August
- SmartOS ZFS Architecture
- Adding Per-Thread Caching to libumem
- SmartOS: An SA Primer
- Adding Per-Thread Caching to libumem (footnote)
October
- illumos Day: illumos Innovations That Will Never be in Oracle Solaris
- illumos Day: Chris Nelson, Bayard Bell, Robert Mustacchi
- ZFS Day: Justin Gibbs and Will Andrews, Brian Behlendorf
- ZFS Day: George Wilson
- ZFS Day: Architecting ZFS Solutions
- SmartOS Operations — Ben Rockwood at illumos Day
- Hybrid Storage Pools: Using Disk and Flash with ZFS
- Darwin’s Storage
- Building a Business on illumos
- Enhanced OS Virtualization for the Cloud
- Why 4K?
- DevOps Demystified – An introduction to the ideas that are driving DevOps
- The illumos Home Data Center
- ZFS State of the Union
- ZFS Day Panel: The State of ZFS on…
- Making the Impossible Possible: Disposable Staging Environments At Scale
- DTracing the Cloud
- ZFS Performance Analysis and Tools
- Running Without a ZFS Root Pool
- illumos State
2013
Marketing your tech talent at the Monktoberfest
November
LISA and metrics workshop – Brendan Gregg led a Metrics Workshop, along with Narayan Desai, Kent Skaar, Theo Schlossnagle, and Caskey Dickson. “This was an opportunity for many industry professionals to discuss problems with performance metrics and monitoring, and to propose and discuss solutions.” More details from Brendan here.
Women in Advanced Computing Panel USENIX LISA 13
Video collection (81)
- Cloud Performance: What’s in the Course
- Cloud Performance 1.1: Explain Systems Performance
- Cloud Performance 2.3.1: Explain Latency
- Cloud Performance 2.3.4 Tuning
- Cloud Performance 8.1 File Systems Terminology
- Cloud Performance 8.8 File Systems Tuning
- Cloud Performance 8.6.17 File Systems Other Tools
- Cloud Performance 8.10 File Systems Microbenchmarking
- Cloud Performance 8.6.16 File Systems kstat
- Cloud Performance 8.6.4 File Systems & DTrace
- Cloud Performance 8.6.3 File Systems – truss and strace
- Cloud Performance 8.6.12 File Systems Cache Usage
- Cloud Performance 8.6.1 File Systems & vfsstat
- Cloud Performance 8.5.9 Memory-Based File Systems
- Cloud Performance 8.5.8 File Systems Workload Separation
- Cloud Performance 8.5.6 File Systems Static Performance Tuning
- Cloud Performance 8.5.3 File Systems Workload Characterization
- Cloud Performance 8.5.2 File Systems Latency Analysis
- Cloud Performance 8.5.1 File Systems Disk-Only Analysis
- Cloud Performance 8.4.5 File Systems FFS and UFS Related Performance
- Cloud Performance 8.4.5 File Systems ZFS Performance
- Cloud Performance 8.4.4 File Systems Features
- Cloud Performance 8.4.3 File Systems Caches
- Cloud Performance 8.4.2 File Systems & VFS
- Cloud Performance 8.3.12 Logical vs Physical I/O
- Cloud Performance 8.3.11 File Systems Metadata
- Cloud Performance 8.3.10 Memory-Mapped File Systems
- Cloud Performance 8.3.8 File Systems I/O
- Cloud Performance 8.3.7 File Systems – Synchronous Writes
- Cloud Performance 8.3.6 File Systems – write-through and write-back caching
- Cloud Performance 8.3.3 File Systems Random vs Sequential I/O
- Cloud Performance 8.3.1 File Systems Latency
January
February
April
May
- Solving Problems with DTrace on Any Platform
- Debugging with DTrace
- DTrace
- Building a Monitoring Framework Using DTrace and MongoDB
June
July
- Open Source Systems Performance
- Kartlytics
- Reverse Engineering the Bootloader of Life – an Abacus for Complexity
- A Midsummer Night’s System – Introduction
- The New Systems Performance
- Baby steps towards a general theory of performance analysis tools
- Streams
- ::gcore
- A Midsummer Night’s System Part 2
September
- Node.js at Joyent: Debugging Tools and Manta – Part 1
- Node.js at Joyent: Debugging Tools and Manta – Part 2
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Brendan Gregg
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Garrett D’Amore
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Bill Moore
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Blake Jones
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Kevin Zimmerman
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Sunay Tripathi
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Max Bruning
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Robert Mustacchi
- The 3rd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Eric Schrock & Adam Leventhal
October
November
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 1
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 2 – Introductions
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 3 – Themes and Agenda
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 4 – Disk I/O
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 5 – Monitoring Visualizations
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 6 – Audience & Questions
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 7 – Methodologies
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 8 – Group Exercise
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 11 – Statistics & Visualizations
- Metrics Workshop at LISA – Part 10 – Implementation
- Women in Advanced Computing Panel LISA
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 1
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 2
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 3
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 4
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 5
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 6
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 7
- OpenZFS Developer Summit Part 8
2014
May
June
Stockholm – My first trip to Stockholm for Ericsson. I ended up making that journey about four times a year, except during cancer treatment.
July
Marketing your tech talent talkat OSCON
September
November
LISA – I attended LISA 2014. I knew I’d see a bunch of friends there, and it would likely be the last conference I’d be able to attend for a while.
Video collection (5)
February
2015
August
Intel Developer Forum — I worked this one for Ericsson, just returning to conference life while finishing cancer treatment.
Video collection (2)
February
2016
April
August
Visit to Facebook’s Prineville Data Center
2017
March
Open Compute Platform Summit — this was the one where a young man at a booth made the assumption that I didn’t know anything about hardware.
April
Dockercon – This was the last event I attended for Ericsson, and honestly I didn’t have a good reason (from Ericsson’s point of view) to be there – by that time I was well on the path to my next gig. But Brendan was speaking, and it was held in Austin. I heard some good music, ate some good food, and saw old friends, including one who was about to be a new colleague at AWS.
June
First week at AWS – I had been to Seattle a few times before, but of course I’d be seeing a lot more of it over the next few years.
July
AWS Evangelists’ Summit – I was back in Seattle six weeks after my first trip, to participate in the annual get-together of AWS evangelists from all over the world – a very fun bunch of people whose expertise and skills in sharing that expertise I quickly learned to rate very highly. Our team, Open Source Marketing (though some team members didn’t want to admit that marketing was what we were there fore) had similar tasks and skills. We had a couple of days of presentations on upcoming services and technologies, and one of those team-builder puzzle games – which was fun, but the weather was hot and the air in Seattle very polluted from forest fires – I ended up with a miserable sinus infection.Seattle
September
Marketing Your Open Source Project, Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, Los Angeles, (not filmed, but there’s a writeup and slides)
Kernel Recipes and EuroBSD, Paris — Brendan spoke at both, I went along for the ride and mostly worked while he was conferencing, the rest of the time we were in Paris together. The BSD conference included an evening cruise on the Seine. I was highly amused that I often seem to do these things in the company of geeks (like myself).
2018
March
Marketing Your Open Source Project(the AWS version), Southern California Area Linux Expo, Pasadena
AWS Summit Milan – I spoke at the AWS Summit in Milan. That was the excuse – the real reason for the trip, in which I was joined by my BFF Sue, was to clear my remaining personal belongings out of my former home in Lecco, where my ex was (and is) still living. Another speaker at the Summit was Tara Walker, an AWS evangelist who gave one of the best technical talks I’ve heard. I knew it was good because the audience were sitting bolt upright, paying attention, rather than looking at their laptops or phones.
May
I Will Survive: How Deirdré Straughan Built a Career in Tech Without Being An Engineer, (I was a guest/interviewee on my friend Melinda Byerley‘s podcast, Stayin’ Alive in Tech)
June
EkoSystem Day, An event about all things Kubernetes on AWS, held at the AWS Loft in San Francisco
Amazon Linux 2 launch, San Francisco
July
Unconference session on marketing open sourceat the Community Leadership Summit, Portland,
August
VMworld, Las Vegas
September
Dreamforce This was one of the world’s largest conferences, with around 180,000 attendees in 2018. Hotel rooms in San Francisco had long been sold out – in at least one prior year, the organizers had docked a cruise ship at a city wharf to house attendees. I was asked at the last minute to do live social media about AWS’ participation in the event, but where I lived in Campbell was too far from the city to commute to the conference, so one of the AWS events staff gave up her hotel room for me (I suspect she was grateful not to have to attend).
You can see in the above photo how big the “campus” was. Somehow the events that I was supposed to cover had me running from the Intercontinental Hotel on one end to the Salesforce tower on the other. At least I wasn’t stuck inside a single conference hall the entire time.
Metallica Final Encore at DreamForce
October
My Career Evolution from Tech Writer to… Many Thingsinternal Amazon tech writers’ conference, Seattle,
All Things Open – This was my first time attending ATO, and I delivered my Marketing Your Open Source Project talk. Brendan was also a speaker, though the organizers gravely miscalculated his popularity – they put him in a small room which ended up packed to the walls and way too hot. AWS had a booth where I and many others helped Shirley Bailes, event organizer extraordinaire, and I also live-Tweeted the AWS speakers. Raleigh
USENIX LISA – Brendan and Rikki Endsley co-chaired USENIX LISA. I was, as usual, along for the ride, but also managed to pull off a surprise birthday party for Brendan. Nashville
November
AWS re:Invent — I had not been allowed to attend re:Invent in 2017, my first year at AWS. In 2018, I went as a designated social media person, which made for an extremely busy and interesting few days. My birthday happened to fall on one of them, but I was too damned tired to do anything about it. I dragged myself back to the Wynn hotel and walked into the first restaurant I found, which happened to be Italian. I told them it was my birthday and they treated me very kindly.
December
Yow! — In one of the more insane things I ever did travel-wise, I flew from re:Invent in Las Vegas via LAX to Brisbane, where I joined Brendan on his tour with the Yow! conference. Met a lot of cool people, heard some interesting talks.
2019
February
Marketing Your Open Source Project, AWS Summit Berlin
March
Marketing Your Open Source Project, AWS Summit Milan
July
^ Marketing Your Open Source Project , OSCON – slides
December
Marketing Open Source (builders’ session), re:Invent, Las Vegas
2020
As a product marketing manager, I launched three new observability services for AWS: AWS Distro for Open Telemetry, Amazon Managed Grafana, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus – the latter two were major launches at re:Invent, and a day or two after all that was done we moved to Australia.
2021
2022
January
Interviewed by Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud
Joined Intel.
2023
February
Quit Intel.
Undated videos
Video collection (42)
- Wiring the TVBLOB Media Center
- Interview with Dave Stewart
- Getting Started is the Hardest Part
- Disks Chapter Done
- File Systems Chapter Completed
- Methodologies & OS Chapters Done
- The Book is Finished
- Why a Systems Performance Book?
- Brendan wrestles with writer’s block
- Open Storage Analysts’ Round Table p2
- Open Storage Analysts’ Round Table
- Introduction to Performance Tuning
- Immutable Service Containers
- Solaris Developer Tools
- Sun Tech Days Multicore
- Studio – experiment with audio filters?
- Introducing Ashutosh Tripathi
- Introducing Nandan
- Introducing Siva
- COMSTAR Tutorial Convert a Sun Server into a Fibre Channel Storage Array
- Introducing Madhur
- ZFS in the Trenches Part 1
- The Making of “Shouting in the Datacenter”
- Business Continuity with Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition
- QFS Shared File Services for Scale and Cache Coherency
- How QFS Wins the Battle Against Global Warming
- Trailer Grid as Enabling Technology for Climate Research
- Interview with Max Alt of Intel
- Interview with Kelly Nishimura OpenSolaris Program Manager
- Contributing to DTrace
- Peter Buckingham on COMSTAR
- An Introduction To Parallel Programming 3: Parallel Architectures
- An Introduction To Parallel Programming 4: Parallel Programming Basics
- An Introduction To Parallel Programming 7: Hybrid Programming Model and What’s Next
- Parallel Programming Models 5: Distributed Memory and MPI
- Parallel Programming Models 6: Shared Memory, Auto Parallel, OpenMP
- The history of Easy CD
- Open Storage Summit Kaitschuk
- DevCon Cluster
- DevCon Cluster part 1
- DevCon IPs
- Nexenta, Open Storage, and Commercial Open Source – DevCon
