Nix Bits

Somehow, two and a half years have passed since I accepted my current position and I hadn’t kept my resume up to date. I fixed that today. I had actually kept a company-internal resume somewhat up to date but my public resume has just sat here missing all the stuff I’ve done. There was actually a round of layoffs at work as well as in the industry in general that reminded me that I hadn’t really kept it up. While I don’t think I’m in danger of getting cut, letting your resume grow stale is just not a good idea.

And my work has changed enormously over the years. If you would have talked to me 3 years ago, i would have probably described myself primarily as a Linux/UNIX systems engineer with a networking background. Prior to that, I was knee deep in ISP work — networking stuff like BGP routing, fiber optic SONET links, and particularly cable modem termination systems. Now I’m just about as deep in the SAN engineering world though my particular focus has been backups, recovery, archiving, and disaster recovery.

While I am really deep in these technical realms, I sometimes worry that the resume looks scattered to outside observers. “Does he really have that deep a hands-on familiarity with all that stuff?” umm. Yes. That said, I should probably develop multiple resumes that focus on different facets of what I do so if I ever have to apply for a storage engineering role, I have a resume focused in that direction. Or if I get called up to do some CMTS/WAN work, I can emphasize those bullets.

Despite all this seemingly dull backend infrastructure stuff (though it’s not really dull to me), I do get to do some more “fun” things. When I first got here I stood up an internal Wiki for all our internal documentation and it’s grown far, far beyond the amount of content that had been created here in the previous 10 years. And it’s kept way more up to date. I certainly do more writing on that Wiki than I do publically.

I also stood up a Jabber server for internal Instant Messaging with a coworker. Our team is spread between Little Rock and NOLA so it’s become an invaluable help in keeping everybody in constant communication and try and keep the geographically driven team split/rivalry from happening.

And lately I’ve been able to play around a lot with Virtualization, both Xen and VMWare. I’d stood up some stuff in the lab to help a lot of our Solaris-oriented folks familar with Linux as well as start looking closer at Xen and VMWare. I don’t really get to fool with our ESX clusters since that’s currently all Windows (that’s likely to change). Now I’m looking at ESXi and how that might plug in to our Linux/Solaris X86/X86_64 mix.

Oh, and I get to play with robots. Yeah, they’re tape drive robots, but watching those handbots fly around inside a gigantic tape libary is kinda entertaining.