Dilpreet Bindra's Weblog

perception versus reality

First, let me apologize for being away so long and promise :::fingers crossed::: to blog as frequently as possible (but only when I have something interesting to say). Eric mentioned a while ago that I was the first FMAer to blog, even though I would love the title, it is incorrect and Andy Rudoff owns that distinction. Andy along with others have been working on and delivered a really cool Fault Diagnosis Engine (will have more on what this is later), which allows you to describe the faults in a particular system or subsystem based on the symptoms (error telemetry) that this system/subsystem experiences in the presence of that fault. I will let him describe it further, also more later from me regarding FMA (Predictive Self-Healing).

Now to the reason for this blog. During dinner last night with some Solaris engineers: Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore (needs a blog because he has a lot of cool things to say), Valerie Bubb and Val Henson (former ZFS junkie), I mentioned how awed I was by the sheer talent gathered in the Solaris group and how the people here never cease to amaze me. They thought it may be blog worthy and after reading Jim's response to Joe Barr, I knew it needed to be shared.

Joe's article states "Perhaps he [Frank Ottink] thinks that a large, vital, worldwide, dedicated group of highly skilled Solaris kernel hackers is going to appear out of nowhere and make it so, simply because Sun has hung the "Open Source" sign out on Solaris 10." as Jim has already mentioned in his blog we *already* have all of the above. Except the term "hacker" does not do them justice. The development community in Sun and particularly in the Solaris team are engineers in every sense of the word. They are driven, focused, devoted, visionaries with attention for detail like master craftsmen/women. The article goes on to say "Let's come back to this in a couple of years and compare the community of Linux kernel hackers with the community of Solaris 10 kernel hackers. If the Solaris "community" is as large, skilled, and productive as the Linux community, I'll eat one of those Red Hats.", Solaris 10 is a testament to how skilled and productive our community *already* is. In a hallway conversation earlier in the evening, Byran (of Dtrace fame), happened to mentioned that he was told "you're a hacker, we're going to make you into an engineer" when he joined Sun, if he ever was a hacker he sure isn't now.

This is the culture and the community we have to offer, and what we will export. IMHO, this is much more valuable to the community at large than the code itself.
(2004-11-23 10:19:48.0) Permalink