Rambling Ken

Week 3

Finishing up my 3rd week. Quite the dip in the deep end, but it's still quite exciting. Focusing on how to take what we've got in Software, make sense of it, find out who's doing what, and what areas people really needed help in solving.

My particular challenge is how to create turnkey software stacks, with a sub-challenge being to help define what pieces are needed for those stacks, and what pieces are available internally, and which of those are being made available externally, and how.

My other goals is to start "working from the end state", what problems are being solved, and why, to determine the appropriate toolbox needed to solve those particular problems. As an engineer, it's all to easy to look in today's toolbox, and figure out exactly how to solve any problem with the tools at hand. That's great when you're delivering to other people just like you, but if you're delivering (directly or indirectly) to someone who isn't like you, you've gotta figure out how to step back.

More on all that in the coming weeks as I nail down the how, now that I'm getting a handle on the what.

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Posted at 05:41PM Mar 15, 2007 by kenwallich in Personal  |  Comments[0]

My new twitter addiction

Think of it as "group IM". Short, play-by-play oriented. Interesting idea, it's got some work to go in terms of multiple groups of contacts, depending on what you're twittering about. But, as en-mass IM, it's interesting.

It appears that SXSW pushed it from a thing some folks were toying with to something a lot of folks are toying with.

Check it out, it might be a fad, or a hot new communications medium: Twitter

Then, for extra credit, compare and contrast with Tumblr. Then, realize you can put your twitter feed on tumblr (and your flickr feed, your blog feed, etc).

Posted at 08:50PM Mar 13, 2007 by kenwallich in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Back to Sun

Well, after nearly 3 years, I'm back at Sun.

Came back for several reasons, but primarily because I'm very excited about my new role. I'm working on defining the specific details, but primarily, I'm tasked with organizing and delivering a complete software stack (current internal lingo calls it a distro) to solve the needs of early-stage startups and other such small-scale environments who at present have to assemble then build their own custom infrastructure before deploying their content. Think turnkey software stacks, containing the OS up through the necessarily applications to get the job done, all preconfigured for your enjoyment.

I'll be working with the groups at Sun who already provide much of the underpinnings to make this happen, as well as new bits of Open Source being made available, and then some amount of infrastructure/mechanism provided by my group to tie it together, and make getting things up and running easy.

I'm excited about the possibilities for future products here, and the balance of optimisim while understanding the hard problems to be solved that is more pervasive then when I left, All of this with a forward looking view of finding out what customers need and want, and a real desire to connect with existing (and future) customers and find out what it takes to give them significant value.

Posted at 02:18PM Mar 02, 2007 by kenwallich in Sun  |  Comments[0]