Jim Walker: Sun Software Engineer

With over 3200 people in attendance, Sun Tech Days 2008 in St. Petersburg, Russia was another successful developer event, and I had the pleasure of working with my colleagues from the local Sun office. It was nice to return to St. Petersburg. I visited Leningrad in December 1988, so I noticed a lot of change. The city is definitely the Paris of the north. I gave the OpenSolaris Testing and OpenStorage for OpenSolaris presentations during OpenSolaris Day on April 4th. I gave the presentations in the main hall where the keynotes where given and had a great audience of over 150 people. Alexander Belokrylov did a great job with the demos, and I enjoyed engaging with the audience and got cheers everytime I spoke a little Russian. I have never seen better questions, and we had more questions than time after both presentations.

In addition, I supported Jim Hughes, with the ZFS demo during the Solaris Track keynote on April 3rd. Here's a picture of Jim, Kirill Nikonchuk, who setup the hardware and me the night before. We had some USB issues with a PC clone, but once we switch to a Sun Ultra 40 everything worked. This picture was taken unattended by timer from the keynote podium. Also here's a pointer to the ZFS is Smashing Baby video on YouTube.



Later in the day after the keynote, my wife Suzanne and I climbed up to the colonnade on St. Isaac's Cathedral to enjoy the view. Here's a picture of me in a Z-DAY tshirt, which highlights Halloween 2005, when zfs was first integrated into Solaris.

Moinak Ghosh presented the OpenSolaris Testing presentation at the Hyderabad Tech Days. Moinak is a great speaker and well know for his contributions to the BeleniX OpenSolaris distribution. I'm glad to get him to do the presentation.

Here's a blurb from Moinak:

"The presentation went well. I could manage the demos questions and all without exceeding the time limit. Murphy was not present in the room so I had zero problems with the demos :)

There were about 200 people in the room. I began my preso with questions like:

How many of you have seen or ever logged into a SPARC machine ?
A couple of hands.

How many have seen or logged into a 16-core 32G Opteron box ?
Just one hand raised.

How many would want access to such machines ?
All hands raised :)


So you need to become an OpenSolaris contributor and contribute fixes/enhancements ..."