Solaris Day at the University of Washington
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20060512 Friday May 12, 2006

Solaris Day at the University of Washington

I gave some presentations at a recent Solaris Day at the University of Washington in Seattle, so I figured I would give a very brief trip report. I talked about the Sun Studio tools in general (slides), and I also talked about developing multi-threaded apps on Solaris (slides). The slide sets were created by someone other than me, I can't take credit for very much work here, I basically just got up and talked for a while.

We had about 40 people signed up, but only about 10 people showed up. Some were system admins, some were software developers, and some didn't raise their hands for either of those, so they consider themselves something else. For example, one guy I spoke to was responsible for performance troubleshooting on production systems.

I was disappointed that the event wasn't advertised better. It wasn't mentioned anywhere on sun.com, and we had one student show up near the end who would have attended the whole thing if he had known it was being held. We had much more food and give-away items than we needed.

Most of the discussion (as I expected) was focussed on Solaris features, rather than software development. Because I know a lot about Solaris compared to the average Sun Studio engineer, I had a good time discussing Solaris topics with the attendees and with the other presenters. dtrace, ZFS, Xen, Containers(zones) were all asked about enthusiastically at least once.

I had a very good dinner with Angelo (dtrace guy) and Frank Curran (all-around Solaris-Days guy). We discussed ideas for the developer portal and how to bring dtrace into the reach of the masses among other topics.

Posted by Chris Quenelle ( May 12 2006, 01:28:01 PM PDT ) - Permalink - Comments [5] -

Comments:

This is precisely why Linux is ahead of Solaris these days, students are taught linux at the university and today students are tomorrow sysadmins, if Sun and the OpenSolaris community doesnt solve that very important issue, the game is over

Posted by Darkjoker on May 12, 2006 at 03:48 PM PDT #

Unfortunately, Darkjoker has a point. As good as Solaris is, not enough students are exposed to it. Sun's never been the best at marketing, but I feel the marketing efforts to Universities could/should be stepped up some, but I won't go so far as to say "the game is over."

Posted by Wes Williams on May 13, 2006 at 06:02 AM PDT #

Oh please don't tell me you stopped in the Portland area too!

Posted by Jeffrey Olson on May 15, 2006 at 07:03 AM PDT #

Darkjoker expressed himself in an over-simplified way, but he has a good point. Actually, one of the people I met with in Seattle was the "OpenSolaris student activist". He's a student at UW who works closely with the Sun university sales rep that covers UW. Sun is definately paying attention to this area. The Solaris Days program is a very "spur of the moment" type program (from what I gather). Often we work with local OpenSolaris user groups. So if you want such an event in your area, contact your local Sun sales rep and ask if he can make it happen. Of couse, you need to convince him we can get enough attendees. Also of course, getting people to show up is a joint responsibility.

Sorry, Jeff. I was at 25,000 feet when I went by Portland. Didn't you see me wave? ;-)

Posted by Chris Quenelle on May 15, 2006 at 10:02 AM PDT #

Oh that was you? I thought it was just a bird... err, nm :)

Posted by Jeffrey Olson on May 15, 2006 at 11:24 AM PDT #

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mug shot Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Sun Microsystems. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun for more than 10 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

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