Skrocki's Blog: Sun, Social Networking, Random Thoughts...

Today is my last day at Sun. It has been a thrilling ride and one that I would do all over again. I've learned a lot, worked with some of the most brilliant people on the planet, worked for the world's best management team who was more than willing to accommodate my requests to work on programs that most inspired me & happy to give me room to get my groove on, and now...I walk away with more experience and friends than I ever imagined I'd acquire through a job. I kicked butt & had fun! (I hope someone creates a tee-shirt for that McNealy-ism.)

Hands down, my favorite role (ever) is the one I am now exiting. Being your tour guide for Sun's community sites (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.) went beyond just a job -- it became an obsession. I was lucky enough to work directly with tens of thousands of Sun fans worldwide & Sun employees in every organization and in every rank in the company -- from interns to our CEO. I've enjoyed every minute & every conversation (well, minus the spammers, trolls, & an unnamed executive blogger who asked me to air brush his mustache off his profile picture).

While it makes me sad that this is my last blog post on this site, I welcome change and wish my Sun fellows well as they embark on the next incarnation of Sun. "Thank you" to each of you for such fond memories -- especially those who helped make the community sites such thriving & robust communities. It's no wonder Sun is seen as a pioneer in this space and a poster child for corporate social media done right.

The world is a whole lot more connected thanks to social sites, so there's no need to say good-bye -- I'm just right here, here, here & here. I have a few irons in the fire & will be sure to keep you posted on my next big thing.

To new beginnings!

Note: Comments are closed on this blog, but we can chat over here.

Deirdré Straughan kicked off a Facebook wall post requesting help with finding a Denver based venue for the November 19th Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner. Per Deirdré "Venue could be a dinner or drinks-and-appetizers kind of place, I don't have strong feelings about it but suspect a place with room to mingle is best."

This is a fantastic networking opportunity for attendees & a great outreach opportunity for a company who may be interested in hosting/sponsoring the event. The last dinner, hosted at the Sun Microsytems Broomfield campus, had move than 80 attendees. Sun was generous enough to provide food & drinks (approx cost ~$1500). As of this post, there are 131 members in the Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner Facebook group, so it's reasonable to expect an even larger crowd at the next dinner.

If you're interested in hosting the event and/or becoming a member of the Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner group, you can do so via the Facebook page.

Since my 1st official blog post 5+ years ago, I've been a sole blogger (only blogger contributing to a blog), a soul blogger , a group blogger, a behind-the-scenes blog helper (for friends, interesting people & high profile people with a blogphobia), a blog trainer, a blog site admin, but never an invited guest blogger...until now!

Thanks to another "serendipitous connection via social networking", as I call it, I can now sport around the badge titled "Guest Blogger". It all started when @KylePLacy, Author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, tweeted the following to me "I really think you should do a guest post on my blog. What do you think?" To which I responded "What if my neglected blog finds out? What did you have in mind?".

I went with a topic that is often discussed: Corporate Social Media Policies -- something Sun, specifically the Sun Blog Founders, nailed several years ago and continues to be a solid template for other companies social media policies. Have a look at the guest post "Do Tight Corporate Social Media Policies Help or Hinder?" & let me know what you think.

A million thanks to Deirdré Straughan, Sun videoblogger extraordinaire for organizing a very successful 1st Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner, held at Sun's Broomfield campus last week. Thanks also to my boss, Will Snow, Sr. Engineering Director, for helping to fund the event.

In case you missed it, Jodi Brooks with CBS Denver News and Deirdre have posted summaries.

If you are a woman in tech in the Denver metro area, please join @DeirdreS and me as we co-host a Girl Geek Dinner at the Sun Microsystems campus in Broomfield. Here are the deets:

Thursday, March 5, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pm
Sun Microsystems Broomfield Campus
Sun Conference center, Building 1
500 Eldorado Blvd.

Please RSVP via the Facebook page or the wiki.

We look forward to seeing you!

A notable milestone for Sun Forums was reached today in the form of seeing it's four millionth post.

I've been lucky enough to be a part of the team the last few years and as a result have engaged directly with the community -- it's been an invaluable education in the community space. If you're looking for a lesson in community dynamics, community policy building, community moderation, or just want to learn to be an effective community contributor, I recommend you find a forum that interests you and engage. You'll find the experience and the rewards are different from any other community site. For example, forums conversations are faster-flowing than blogs, yet more focused and organized than super fast flowing micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

In terms of annual page views and visits, Sun Forums is by far Sun busiest community site. To offer context, here's a quick glimpse of traffic for Sun forums, blogs, wikis for 2008:

	Views	Visits	Site Age
Wikis	4.6M	1.3M	<2 yrs
Blogs	21.8M	12.2M	<5 yrs
Forums	66.4M	36.0M	<8 yrs

That's a lot of communication going on! If you are a Sun employee, chances are the project you are working on has a forum dedicated solely to that topic -- an excellent opportunity for you to engage with the folks who share that commonality. Let us know if you're interested in becoming a Sun Moderator of a particular forum or if you'd like to nurture a forum on a new topic.

I also want to give a shout-out to the Sun Forums Lead Engineer, who has been committed to the site since day one, always has a positive disposition and a "can do" attitude...Congrats & a million thanks Ramsci!

Via the Doodle Blog, this made me happy. Doodle, one of my favorite sites -- & one that I use at least once daily -- is a member of Sun's Start Up Essentials Program.

"The Sun Startup Essentials program is designed to help startups get off the ground fast, at lower cost, primed for rapid growth and success. Sun supports startups with hardware, software, training, and support. The partnership with Sun is an obvious step for Doodle because major components of our technical architecture are maintained by Sun: Java and MySQL."

If you haven't used Doodle to poll meeting/event participants for a meeting time that works for the majority, you must try it out at least once. It's super quick & easy to use.

I love Wikipedia. I have since the moment I first set eyes on it. I use it everyday. I have it email me informational love notes. I even gave my grandmother a Wikimedia donation in her name for Christmas one year. Her reaction was unforgettable. "What is this? Why didn't you just give me the cash instead?!" So, she doesn't give a hoot about Wikipedia. That won't stop me from loving it. Ever. (Side note: I can talk like that because she doesn't read this blog, but if you run into her, let's keep the re-enactment on the down low.)

So, why the "even deeper love", you ask? Well, as Rafe Needleman so eloquently puts it, "Wikimedia is buying truckloads of Sun servers". Here's why:

"The new Sun platform will enable Wikipedia to enable users to seamlessly upload files up to 100MB. The free encyclopedia is one of the five most popular web properties in the world, with more than 250 million unique visitors each month and a 100,000-strong community of active volunteer editors. Wikipedia uses MySQL as its primary database software. The Wikimedia Foundation is also a Sun Startup Essentials program member, which has enabled it to get high-performance, enterprise-grade systems at attractive startup prices."

As Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, says "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

I'm glad Sun will have a part in enabling the delivery of that knowledge in rich media form.

I'm no storage expert, but when one of my favorite uber geeks (a term of endearment used to describe a guy who has run massive sites for decades) tells me "This is the greatest [bleeping] thing since sliced bread!", I know it's a big deal -- not the kind of "Oh, Sun released another new product" kind of deal, but more of a "This has never been done before and changes the whole ball game" kind of deal.

The beauty of the new Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems is it solves for major cost AND efficiency issues...the coolness factor is the icing on the cake.

Anywho, check out the video below for more info. If you're on Twitter, you saw that Hal is memorizing his notes to present at CEC, but if you're not there, you can join a discussion with him & the storage engineers on Blog Talk Radio at 5PM PT today.

For those bargain bin shoppers, like me, you can try the new storage systems for free for 60 days then, get a discount OR...check out the fine print on the Big Cheese's blog post for a chance to win one for F-R-E-E (as in no I.O.U...ever). Good luck!

The new look for Sun.com just rolled out! Be sure to check out the "Community Voices" link in the upper left corner -- that's where the good stuff is (per my biased opinion ).

Huge props and congrats to the extended Sun.com Team!

By now, many of us have possibly met our saturation point on the topic of weathering the economic storm, but if you have room for one more perspective, this one is worth a look.

It's not all gloom and doom, but is a solid perspective with some practical ideas that individuals and companies (of various sizes) can do to find stability and perhaps prosperity in the current economic climate.

Tim has a few blog posts on the topic in case you are interested in joining the conversation.

It's always good to lift one's head up from the trenches, take a look back and soak in the glory of progress. That's what I did today on behalf of the amazing engineering team I get to work with and here's what I saw:

Over the last two quarters, between 4 Application Engineers, 1 Development Manager, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Program Manager (me!) & one part-time Search Program Manager, working on 6 applications, the team drove the following to fruition:

• 30 application upgrades
• 225 change requests
• supported 6 of Sun's applications that saw ~60 million page views and 21.4 million search results

All while infusing respect and humor into our day-to-day activities. I consider myself lucky to be on a team with these guys. Congrats Allen, Igor, Matthew, Rama, Ramsci, Rob, Shawn and our leader who enables our pace and delivery, Will!

To see the goodness for yourself, check out Sun Forums, Wikis, Mediacast, Planets, Search and of course this very site Sun Blogs.

Medicast.sun.com has gotten a lot of love in the form of new hardware, a database upgrade, and today it will receive a new look and new highly demanded features -- my favorite is the embed code feature that enables users to easily copy code for embedding mediacast-hosted media into their blogs, websites, etc. Full release notes are posted on the wiki, but here's a before (top) and after (bottom) glimpse:

I was just chatting with ThinGuy about the following video. Truth be told, I'm turned off by many technology videos because I find them boring, but you have to watch this one. Scott McNealy (Sun Chairman) and Terry Matthews (Mitel Chairman) are such compelling communicators, they could be talking about dirt and the conversation would be worth a listen. But, that's not all. Following their intro, is an incredibly cool demo of the Sun Ray and Mitel telephony system solution -- I WANT ONE!

Which reminds me (apologies for the side note) of a conversation I had with another colleague today about how Sun and non Sun social networks have triggered me to have a deeper awareness of Sun initiatives (like this one) that are not directly related to the focus of my role. I got to know ThinGuy through his blog which triggered an opportunity to meet him and his lovely wife for dinner. Though we live in different states, my husband and I have become great friends with them...and I know more about Sun Rays than I ever expected.

He's still the king of the one liners...