Ijoined Forsythe to be able to work closely with a person whose name kept popping up every time I taught a DTrace class for SunEd. A customer in the class would say oh yea Jarod Jenson was here last week or last month and he solved our performance problem in less than a day. I wrote the DTrace course (SA-327-S10) for Sun Educational Services starting in March of 2004 and then taught it for 3 plus years (as well as Solaris 10 Internals, Multi-threaded Programming and Crash Dump Analysis) before joining Forsythe. Brendan Gregg of DTrace Toolkit fame was one ofthe first students in my Train the Trainer DTrace class. I wanted to actually use (instead of just teach) this revolutionary tool that lets you observe any software as it executes in a thread on a processor. And who better to learn its actual use on real customer applications than from the recognized master: Jarod Jenson. I am also finding that Forsythe has some of the best talent in the industry with a reputation for delivering solutions to its customers.
I come from a software development and training background. In my earlier days I was a kernel software engineer at AT&T Bell Labs working on (with 40 other engineers) the development of an operating system to drive AT&T's PBXs (now AVAYA). This OS named Oryx/Pecos was designed by Gary Sager who later moved over to Sun to do some of the design work on NFS. Oryx/Pecos used all the latest OS ideas at the time: real-time scheduling, micro-kernel, message passing, capabilities based. Very Mach-likebut a few years earlier. It never really caught on because of its proprietary nature. After finding software development a bit tedious, I went on (at the request of Marc Rochkind inventor of SCCS on UNIX) to teach one of the first UNIX seminars back in 1983 and have been doing teaching/course development on and off ever since.
What I hope to do in my blog entries is to pass on my knowledge of Solaris 10 Internals, mdb and DTrace to the non-programmers of the world. I enjoy teaching basic computer science concepts that many people in the IT industry never had a chance to formally learn. What is a 4-way set associative cache, hash table, data structure, linked list, thread, compiler, debugger, stack, stack trace, mutex, etc. I hope not to insult the pure computer scientists out there with my simple explanations.
I spend my free time with my wife and two teenage daughters, reading technical material or books on non duality, occasional poker night with the boys, and going on one of the many local hiking trails in Boulder where I have lived for nearly 30 years now.
