Now for some organizational and career lessons I've learned over 30 years.

The Team's the Thing

Over the years, I've been fortunate to have worked with many excellent people - successful founders, coding machines, people who have changed the direction of technology from CPUs up to distributed storage systems. Here's the . . .

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Now that the chronological sequence is done, it's time to distill some of the lessons I've learned from all of those jobs and projects. I've seen a lot of things that work, and a lot of things that don't work, so here's some free advice based on patterns I've seen.

Time Spent Up Front Is Worth It

I think of this as something . . .

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When I was forced to leave the POSIX team at Facebook, I faced a fork in the road. One option was to stay with the domain and the people I knew within the storage organization, which included four other projects that were more-or-less close to what I'd been doing on Gluster. The other option was to stay with a style of development that I . . .

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This is both the easiest and the hardest part of my memoirs to write. It's easy because everything's fresh in my memory. It's hard because it's the nature of memoirs to be very subjective, and there are still lots of people likely to read this who will have interpreted the very same events quite differently than I did. There's a high . . .

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After the collapse of SiCortex, I got to experience modern unemployment. Among other things, this meant using COBRA for health insurance, and seeing how much that cost. I'm doing the same now BTW, even though this time the separation was voluntary. Another thing I did was interview at lots of places. I remember one of them was Iron Mountain, . . .

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After I'd been at SiCortex a while, we actually started trying to sell systems to customers. Crazy idea, I know. One of the first systems (the first?) was installed at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois. While I wasn't involved in the actual install, I ended up going there later because they wanted to try using PVFS2 instead of Lustre. . . .

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For a long time, especially before our daughter was born, my wife and I were fairly avid hikers. Sometimes we would hike by ourselves, sometimes with the Appalachian Mountain Club. As it turns out, one of our favorite AMC group leaders was an early employee at SiCortex. During my period of discontent at Revivio, we got to talking about . . .

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