Due to lack of net-connectedness at my mother’s house, I haven’t been able to blog for a couple of days.
On Monday I visited Tarantella engineering in Leeds. I met with several senior staff, and we had a lively all-hands discussion based on my “Engineering@Sun” slides. A couple of the team were particularly interested in supercomputer topics, and so I gave a short presentation on the status of Sun’s DARPA-funded HPCS program. I got a taxi back to Leeds Station, and took the train back to Oxford. (Curiously, the Monday train was a 6-car unit, and was by no means full; on the other hand the “sardine-only” train on Sunday was only 4 cars long. I discussed this with the guard – or train manager, or whatever they call them these days – and apparently this is typical. Bizarre.)
The first day of November was sunny and mild: the forecasters are predicting a brutally-cold winter, but autumn is turning out to be unseasonably pleasant. It took me two hours to drive down to Woking to StorageTek UK for my second visit. This time I spent most of my time with the European field service management team and several engineering groups, including one that works on IBM mainframe software. (Yes, Sun now sells mainframe products! We should probably tone down our rhetoric about migrating mainframe users to Sun servers, just a bit….) The M25 was a bit kinder in the evening, and the return journey to Oxford was considerably quicker – in fact, I got back just before my mother. (She’d been giving a talk at a local group in Oxford.)
So we arrive at Wednesday, day 17 of the trip. There was a bit of a mix-up about the schedule: I think I must have told different people different times, and I got to the Sun campus at Guillemont Park (just off the M3) at 9:30, half an hour later than some had expected. Nevertheless, things went off pretty well. I had one 1-on-1 session, but the rest of the meetings were group discussions about Sun engineering practices and career paths. I wanted to explore the similarities – and differences – between the issues faced by companies that Sun had acquired and by those established Sun engineering groups that were remote from the traditional centre of power in Silicon Valley. As I anticipated, the SunUK team was not shy about sharing their opinions! It was a VERY useful session. Many thanks to Alec and Chris for setting things up.
Right now I’m sitting in GMP03, finishing up some email and blogging on my laptop. (I stole an Ethernet cable from a SunRay; hope that’s OK.) Tomorrow, Thursday, I plan to dash into Oxford for a little last-minute shopping, and then head down to Heathrow to get a BA flight to Boston. I should be landing at 9:35pm….