Welcome to the Event Horizon

A couple of weeks before I moved to Colorado to start working for Sun, I went to see acoustic Hot Tuna perform in Scottsdale, AZ. I was living in the Phoenix area at the time, and had a couple of buddies that were at the show, taping it none-the-less. I used to tape concerts, too, but that was a long time ago. At least I got a copy of this show, though. It was a good one, too, by the way.

Between songs, somebody from the crowd yelled, "Jack! You da man!". The rowdy concert-goer was giving his own shout out to Jack Cassady, the bass player. Mind you, this show was happening at a place called "Venue of Scottsdale", which was formerly known as "The Cajun House" for those who might be familiar with the concert/club scene in the east valley. Suffice it to say that this place may have held a few hundred people if it was packed, but on this particular night there were probably no more than 150 people in attendance. I was standing roughly 20 or 30 feet back from the stage. Without missing a beat, Jorma (the guitarist - amazing in his own right) responds "He is the man".

Up until early this week, I spent the vast majority of the previous two weeks trying to root cause a bug in a storage driver I'd never looked at before for a technology I have never worked on before (SAS). This is a somewhat maddening position to be in as all eyes turn to you for answers and you're just beginning to understand the question.

As if I haven't digressed enough yet, let me do so again. As folks like me (if there really is any such thing) are wont to do, we often ponder the meaning of our existence. Let's face it. As engineers, we exist in the hopes that someday, somehow, we're going to develop something that's so revolutionary, so earth-shatteringly brilliant, so cool that engineers we generally look up to in envy will think to themselves, if even for a moment "Wow, that's pretty cool. Why didn't I think of that?" Really, what else is there to live for?

Well, after 38 years on this planet (as of today, thank you very much), I've long since come to the realization that this sort of paradigm-shifting, envy-evoking, brilliant gem of engineering is not very likely to emerge from the likes of me.

That's ok.

Really.

Perhaps it's just a sad rationalization of the meager existence of a faceless engineer at a big company, but after two weeks of struggling with this bug and countless emails and phone calls to other engineers in an attempt to get a grip on the problem, I finally nailed down the root cause. My boss had been after me every day, if not numerous times a day asking for status. I walked over to his office and he asked me "Do you have good news for me?" (We need good news on a regular basis). I told him that indeed, I did have good news, that I had finally discovered the root cause of the driver bug. His immediate response was to point at me and say, "You da man!"

You know what? I am the man. Maybe it was just for a few seconds, but that's also ok.

Really.

And hey, there's always tomorrow to come up with that paradigm shift.

Cheers,

David