My traditional technical focus has been in the areas of Oracle and storage performance. In recent years, I've been quite involved in matters of service delivery where performance is involved. Since much of my career has consisted of "smoke jumping" exercises (a common industry term for flying into difficult situations and sorting them out), I've seen that most of what goes wrong in production are repeated patterns. After several years of flying around, I finally figured out that it is far less wearisome and higher-leverage to capture knowledge on paper than to wrestle cases one-by-one, so I turned to writing a while back.
Among my easier-to-find publications are the Sun Blueprints OnlineTM publications "Sun/Oracle Best Practices" in 2001, and "Performance Forensics" in 2003. I also develop material for various performance-related training internal to Sun, and contribute to selected industry performance symposia.
In today's fast-evolving technology world, knowledge rots so quickly that is can be discouraging to try capturing it at a moment in time via whitepapers. Therefore, beginning now in January 2007, my Good Intentions are to make the occasional posting here in my blog or contribute some tidbits here and there on solarisinternals.com. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for me to post anything, but as of today, I've made a place in corporate cyberspace where my time-to-market can be minutes, not weeks or months!
Whether or not I span the generation gap and start blogging about my kids, cats, cars, or personal concerns is very much TBD!
ADDENDUM: One of the hot topics current in the Sun blogger community is the desire to add a "minor edits" feature to our blog engine to avoid pestering folks with RSS push traffic when bloggers correct typos or make minor phrasing changes. So, this post was my first, and this paragraph is no longer a "minor edit", I guess. My apologies to anyone who gets spammed by my minor edits until we get that sorted out.
Posted by John Franklin on April 28, 2007 at 05:16 PM EDT #