Category: Sun

My colleague Nausheen is involved in Indus Women Leaders (IWL), a national forum that develops South Asian women leaders. While South Asians are one of the most successful minorities in the US, there’s a huge gap between men and women in that community, particularly in education. IWL provides South Asian women with the resources to achieve their life goals through goal setting tools, advocacy, networking, mentorship, and education. They’re holding a Leadership Summit in Boston later this month. Sun‘s sponsoring the event, and it looks really interesting.

I just noticed that an anniversary slipped by last week. My start date at Sun was July 29, 1985. Time flies when you’re having fun….
When I joined the fledgling East Coast Division, there were five of us: Barry Folsom (ex DEC, VP ECD), his admin (whose name I forget), Sharon (HR), and Kim (who, like me, was ex-Mosaic). For a few days we borrowed one room in the Sun sales office in Waltham; it held three chairs, so two of us had to be travelling at all times. Eventually we moved into some rented space up the road, on Winter Street in Lexington. Our offices weren’t actually adjacent, so we came by one midnight and strung some (unauthorized) Ethernet cable through the suspended ceiling panels. My desktop machine was a Sun-1, called “suneast”; my phone line doubled as our UUCP connection to the outside world. A few weeks after that we moved into a new building in Lexington, and I published the existence of suneast to the world. Life was good.

While surfing a random* blog, I came across a quotation that captures exactly what I want Sun to be. Jonathan, are you listening?
But there’s no reason why you can’t create a service organisation of people who all just “Get it.” Virgin do this brilliantly. I recently had to travel to Mumbai. I called Virgin and asked if they flew there. “No,” said the booking woman, “but God, we’d love to!”
In those few words you realise that this person (who can supposedly be replaced by a few lines of online shopping code) was actually party to the kind of decisions happen in Virgin boardrooms. Of course Mumbai fits their brand perfectly – a hip, glamorous town with the world’s biggest movie industry. She understood that as well as anybody on their board.
I’m not saying we should get all reactive, chase off in all directions and become defocussed. But there are many challenging and exciting problems out there, and we should WANT to try to solve them even if we pragmatically choose not to go there. Like the Elephant’s Child in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, I want us to have “satiable curtiosity”.
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* Well, not exactly random. This is the blog of Brian Millar, the guy who created the brilliant Powerpoint Hamlet, as well as other masterpieces such as the ultimate Father’s Day card.

Mary Smaragdis has the distinction of running the most frequently visited blog at blogs.sun.com, due mostly to the irrepressible energy she puts into it. (That’s her with John Gage at the Sun Network event.) Anyway, she ran a little competition to win a Sun Shanghai T-shirt, and when she announced the results my entry was the second runner up… except that the first runner-up was anonymous, and I wasn’t eligible to win anyway. But I was glad to be able to work in a reference to Al Stewart’s music.

Tim Bray mentions in his blog that he attended a meeting of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers this week. As the organizer of that meeting, I was interested in his observations. One of the not-so-subtle reasons that I asked Tim to present was that I’d really like more of the DEs to start blogging: I think that they have a lot of interesting stuff to say. Only a few of us do right now – James, Eduardo, Jim, Dick, myself….
As Tim noted, getting to be a DE involves peer review, and many people assume that this means we’re really some kind of clique or a club. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technically we’re all over the map, from sub-atomic physics to petascale supercomputers, from the mathematics of component failure to the poetry of programming. Some of us have a broad technological or business perspective, others are wholly focussed on our particular area of specialization. Some are interested in talking about process, organizations, and leadership; others want to stick to “hard” engineering. And some are unfailingly courteous, while others are (let’s face it) arrogant SOBs. The two things that unite us are a passion for engineering, and a passion for Sun. It’s an amazing place to be (I joined in 1985) and it’s a privilege to work with such a team – DEs and everyone else.
As you might imagine, putting together a conference program for that crowd is something of a challenge. But we still had a good time, and got a lot done.