Mentoring program notes
I was accepted into the SEED mentoring program at Sun for the Jan '06-June '07 term. I was matched with a truly awesome mentor, Lynn Rohrer, since then we've been working together regularly on business strategy, leadership, and open source.
In April, SEED had its mid-term meeting and following are my notes.
The most interesting talk was given by Jim Baty, the first Distinguished Engineer in Sun Service, on "Everything 2.0". Jim talked about historical Sun a bit:
1st ten years: workstation development
2nd ten years: servers, enterprise Sun-on-Sun
3rd ten years: services
He then asked us each this question: What Sun do you work for?
The important part of the question is 'what measure do you use to describe your Sun'. Is it your geographic location? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it mobile? Is it your organizational location within Sun? I usually think 'software' first, then 'education', then 'open source'. The education piece is bi-directional, I see Sun as a learning place, it is where I learned UNIX and tons of other great stuff, it is also part of my role to educate developers and users about Sun products.
Jim went on to talk about 1.0 versus 2.0. In 1.0 we pushed information to customers, visited customers in person, and made users wait for information. In 2.0, the lines between employees and customers get blurred as we increase collaboration on products and recognize the programmer as the end-user with a broadening of their customer role as innovative contributors. We move away from the push model and begin viral marketing for the participation economy. Where read/write is mostly write and cultural changes re-invent 'your Sun'.
This really resonated with me because OpenSolaris is all about information earlier, participation of everyone on the things that matter most to the community of developers who innovate the most.
Next up was Roger Meike from Sun Labs with some interesting demos of SunSpots.
We all had lunch together that day, then visited the executive briefing center, followed by afternoon talks and a lovely tea party with great food and wine. It was really a wonderful break from the usual Friday and a great opportunity to rub-elbows with lots of technology gurus.
It is a real privilege to be a part of this mentoring program, I have many many other informal mentors and I recommend having multiple mentors throughout any career. I have never been a mentor myself, but I surely will become one. The impact of my mentors on my life and well-being has been huge and I would not be here without their help, advice, consistency, and challenges. I applaud the SEED program for making this a part of our official work, for so many who might not otherwise be able to make time for mentoring.
