Sun STARS around the globe: Constantin Gonzalez

Monday Apr 28, 2008

Did you know that during the 2007 Oktoberfest there were 6.2 million visitors, 69.406 hectoliters of beer consumed and 58.446 units pork knuckles eaten??

I bet our latest Sun STAR, Constantin Gonzalez, can tell us many more interesting facts about his home town of Munich, the capital of the German state of Bavaria!

How long have you been employed at Sun and where are you located?

I've been with Sun for more than 10 years now. I live in Munich, Germany with my wife Friederike and my 21 months old daughter Amanda.

What is your current job role?

At Sun, you don't have one job, you have many . I work for Franz Haberhauer's Platform Technology Team in Sun Germany's Global Systems Engineering (GSE) organization and I'm part of the international Technical Systems Ambassador group.

We evangelize new hardware and OS technologies to customers and take back their feedback to the product groups. Interesting technologies today are Sun's new CMT processors, x64 systems and of course Solaris. Grid Computing and Visualization are other favourite areas of mine, as is Web 2.0.

Most of the time, I stand in front of partners and customers and present about interesting Sun technologies, do pre-sales consulting for customers or help out in internal projects. For instance, I've been lately involved in creating a Solaris training curriculum for GSE in europe.

We also have a group blog called Solarium in which we blog in German about interesting Solaris features, tips and tricks.

What do you like about working for Sun?

I'm a computer scientist (that's a formal term for "geek") by nature, and at Sun you get to play with new and exciting technologies every day! But the biggest part are people. No matter who you work with, there's always a sense of helpfulness and, well, Sun spirit to it.

Please briefly describe any projects you are involved in that support Sun's vision to see everyone and everything participating on the network.

There's a podcast we produce in Germany for the system administrator community at Systemhelden.com. That's german for "System Heroes.com". (There's also an english version at systemheroes.co.uk). The podcast is called HELDENFunk ("Hero Radio") and it's produced by a couple of people from (product) marketing and myself. We feature interviews with interesting people: Sysadmins, bloggers, principal engineers, Sun partners, etc. By encouraging people to podcast (and to blog, participate in wikis, etc.), I try to turn them into active participants in the network.

You may not expect that from someone who's supposed to sell tech stuff, but the reason that user generated content in web 2.0 is successful is because it is authentic. You can't create a portal for sysadmins without having sysadmin/tech type people behind it. Also, it's a great way for me as an SE to reach a bigger audience than would be possible with traditional presentations.

Have you had the opportunity to assist customers in creating energy efficient data centers?

I was involved in introducing customers to UltraSPARC T1 and CMT in Germany. For example, I worked with a financial customer in showing the efficiency and throughput benefits of the T2000 for their Java based application server infrastructure. I've also helped a telco OEM beta test the T2000 for video streaming to handhelds and it proved to be a great streaming server!

Do you have a favorite blog or website?

It's amazing how many bright people blog on blogs.sun.com. You could spend hours reading them! Also, there's some fascinating stuff happening at the Foresight Institute which deals with advancing beneficial Nanotechnology. Who knows, we might end up using tiny rods and gears instead of silicon for very futuristic CPUs...

When commuting or traveling by car, I like to listen to a couple of podcasts, such as the one from Extremetech.com, the EGM live podcast, the German Podcast for Alternative Computer Systems, the Blick ueber den Tellerrand, which is a German web-2.0-in-business podcast, or BrainCast, a German podcast about your brain.

Do you participate in any social networking websites?

Yes, sure. In Europe, Xing is very popular. I'm also on Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter.

Please list any Sun or external communities that you are a member of.

I'm a member of the Sun Technical Systems Ambassadors, a worldwide group of senior SEs that serve as a link between customers and the product groups for CPU, System and HPC related technologies. I'm also a member of the German Unix User's Group " GUUG" and a senior associate at the Foresight Institute.

If you could meet anyone tomorrow, who would it be? Why?

I'd love to meet Rhys Fulber, an amazingly creative electronic musician. He does everything from electronic to punk to metal to sweet pop and if I had more time, I'd spend it learning to create music on my own .

Other interesting people I'd like to meet would be Robert Scoble, the famous blogger and Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist and author.

Tell us a little known fact about yourself.

My dad is from Chile, my mother from Germany. I was born in Germany, went to kindergarten in Colombia, elementary school in Turkey and Germany, then I finished high school in Italy. So I grew up multilingual with Spanish and German, then added English and Italian to the mix .

Outside of work and family, is there anything that you're passionate about (sports, causes, etc.)?

I'm always passionate about the future. That's why I like to be at Sun and why I think Web 2.0 plays such a significant role in the world's culture.

At home, I have a lot of gadgets that are "future" to family and friends. Those are mostly part of our home theater. It's one of those hobbies that are never finished and where you always find something to improve on: Better sound, better picture, streaming audio/video from a ZFS file server in the basement, you know. But it's also one of those hobbies that bridges technology with people: There's nothing like watching a great movie with family and friends, nice picture, clean sound, a good wine (or beer, depending on the movie) and no hassles or endless commercials you'd otherwise get at one of those crowded multiplexes .

Do you have a blog?

Yes, Constantin's Blooog!

Maybe Constantin will add the GSE Divas to his blogroll