My Final Farewell to Sun
I spent 17 years at Sun Microsystems, and while it had its ups and downs, I never had any doubt that it was the best job I ever had. So, one of the things that saddened me about being caught in the layoff 9 months before the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was that I couldn’t be there to say goodbye at the end. Sun was extremely generous to me, and I bear no grudge.
Suddenly, though, a couple of months ago I got a call from an Oracle Sales Rep looking for help with one of his Financial Services customers. Turns out that the customer wanted to buy Sun Grid Engine (a product in which I had specialized), along with a support contract and some consulting to help them get everything set up. Unfortunately, there was nobody left to sell the product, support it, or teach them how to use it.
So, here I am in Austin, Texas for a week of doing what I used to do. I’m building a computing grid for a customer with some very technical and complex workloads, and wearing the old Sun shirts again. And after 15 months away, it really doesn’t seem strange to be traveling again, and things are going quite smoothly. At the end of the week, the customer should be self-sufficient, and probably won’t need me to come back.
I fully expect that this will be my last time setting up Grid Engine for a Sun customer, so…
Goodbye, Sun! It was great to know you.
Hello world!
Well, as you can see, this is a brand new blog.
My first ever, in fact, so bear with me while I flesh this out.
It seems like the right time to do this, since I was laid off today from Sun Microsystems, where I have been working for nearly 17 years. I’m still coming to terms with it, but I think this is not as bad as it might seem. I’m going to treat this as an an opportunity to try something new, hence the initial name of this blog.
And I have experience to help me. I was (very nearly) laid off in 2004, but was called back at the last moment. If you’re interested, you can find an email I sent out about that experience here.
The link in that message is very old and won’t work, but it referred to the announcement that Sun was going to develop the world’s first publicly-available Grid Computing Utility. I worked as Lead Engineer on the project, and we did it. It was kind of cool. Anybody could use our Compute Grid for $1 per CPU/hour.
So, it begins again. Thanks for taking this ride with me.
Curt Harpold
Posted from Rockville, Maryland, United States.
