My name is Michael Clarke and I am currently a student at Aberystwyth University studying for a MEng in Software Engineering. Part of my degree requires me to do a year in industry, and I'm just in the process of finishing this year at Sun Microsystems working for the PTS Global Labs organisation under Paul Humphreys. During the last year I've really got enthusiastic about Sun, not only because of its truly amazing products such as Solaris, ZFS and DTrace - but also the whole community and environment. Everyone who works at Sun is great, always willing to help and share ideas and I found the whole atmosphere inspirational.
I've had so many opportunities and experiences during the last year, from working with Sun's latests and greatest server range, spending a week in Paris at the French lab, to fixing bugs in DTrace (or at least, trying to!). The training provided has been top notch too - I've had my pick of courses including Solaris 10 Administration, 15/25K High-End Server Maintenance and Solaris Internals. What is more, it hasn't stopped there - next week I'm doing a course on Solaris Crash Dump Analysis which should be good fun.
So, you may ask yourself - if this guy is basically just finishing his year at Sun, why has he only just started a blog? The answer is that I haven't finished at Sun, and indeed I've only just begun. I am taking on the role as UK Campus Ambassador Coordinator for the next two years until the end of my degree. This role basically involves looking after all the Campus Ambassadors in the UK who are out there promoting Sun by doing presentations on our technologies, from DTrace to Java and encouraging student participation in projects such as Open Solaris. My experience at Sun over the last year has made me the perfect candidate for such a job, being a student myself I understand the ambassadors needs, but having worked at Sun's UK head office for the last year, I also understand Sun's needs.
This brings me nicely onto the content my new Sun blog. I intend to share with you all my experiences as a Campus Ambassador Coordinator. I also plan to post updates on the things I continue to learn each and every day working for Sun - from how the Solaris Kernel manages virtual memory to how to debug the Solaris boot procedure using OBP (courtesy of Chris Beal).
