About Me

I’ve been messing with computers since my Dad brought home a Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old. From there we built several PC’s from scratch and I fondly remember us “splurging” for the larger hard disk - 40MB vs 25MB! I think we paid an extra $200, which was a lot of money in the 80’s.

But I was never going to go into computers. I went to UCSD to study Cognitive Science - neuroscience and artificial intelligence before “AI” was all the rave. This is back when Lisp was still a thing, Java was brand new, and Python was nowhere to be found. Yeah, I’m that old - oh, “experienced”, sorry.

I fell into the original dotcom boom when I graduated and landed a job at Sun Microsystems (RIP). A one year break turned into 2, 3… but it was so much fun. Sun San Diego was an acquisition of Cray Business Systems, and worked on the Sun e10k Starfire. This was a massive refrigerator-sized machine and everyone - eBay, AT&T, every XYZ.com startup - decided they needed one. We had Friday keg parties between the buildings while they backed up dumptrucks of cash. Not exaggerating - ask anyone who was there.

My boss at Sun coined the term Nateware ™ in reference to the staggering number of Perl scripts I turned out back then (most of them of dubious quality). I released a few open source Perl modules, notably CGI::FormBuilder and SQL::Abstract. But all good things come to an end - or in this case a staggering crash - and when the guy next to me got laid off, I decided it was time to go.

From there I went to Sony PlayStation where I built a system called GLUE that was used to deploy online games worldwide. v1 was written in Perl (of course) but a coworker inspired me to learn Ruby on Rails, so v2 was built in that. Because of the real-time nature of online games, we needed high concurrency, which led me to get pretty deep into networking and atomicity. I wrote an An Atomic Rant and released the redis-objects Rubygem in late 2009.

At the same time, AWS was starting to gain some buzz as the new kid on the block. I was an instant believer as back at Sun we were working on virtual systems and datacenter automation - so I became an early adopter fanboy and started bringing it into PlayStation. There was a tons of skepticism, but eventually people got past that, and after getting to join the AWS Customer Advisory Board (CAB) I discovered I loved working on cloud more than video games.

I joined AWS in the early days - right before the first Re:Invent in 2012. At the time where were 6,000 people who attended which I thought was mind blowing. When I was on the CAB it was a room of 30 people - smart people mind you, CTO’s of NASA, Netflix, Reddit, etc - but