Darrin Johnson's Weblog: Need for speed...

Although my formal education was in Genetics and Biochemistry (minors in Chemistry and Computer Science), I have always been "into" computers starting with owning an Apple II+, doing computational molecular biology in college, and ultimately going the route of software engineering and engineering management. I have had the great fortune of working directly or indirectly on many of the most significant operating systems:

Cray - Unicos, Unicos-MAX, Unicos/mk
Silicon Graphics - Irix
Microsoft - Windows NT/XP
Linux - Various flavors
Sun - SunOS, Solaris

I had alot of fun developing diagnostics for the Unicos flavors and participating on the release teams for each of them. One of the most challenging experiences was being the release program manager for SGI's Irix 6.5 (codenamed appropriately Kudzu). While at Adaptec I had got to build a team that worked onsite at Microsoft and helped Adaptec get involved in the Linux community (back when it was pretty much still just a community). I have had the greatest fortune of managing both Solaris kernel and networking teams.

I can confidentially say (and back it up with the fact that I have stayed the longest at Sun) that Solaris team and OS are the simply the best. Solaris is a total package that includes performance, quality, application adoption, scalability, reliability, etc., innovates in ways that directly benefits customers (simply look at the Solaris 10 features) and is developed/supported by passionate and devoted engineers and management. I take pride in what we have accomplished and am glad that we aren't resting on laurels with a whole bunch of great new innovative technology in the pipeline.

Darrin