News, tips, partners, and perspectives for the Oracle Solaris operating system
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Perspectives
May 13, 2005
New bloggers at Sun
I noted in a blog posting last summer:
Elsewhere I noted that the movement towards greater transparency and customer communications via efforts like blogs.sun.com are a bit strange at the moment since they are both pushing up from the bottom of the org chart, with many engineers and other "individual contributors" participating, and pushing down from the top, with people like Jonathan Schwartz and John Fowler participating, but hasn't met in the middle yet, with the layers of middle management still out of the picture - where many of the decisions people want to know about are made and best explained. (For instance, you can find my blog here, and that of the VP I work for, Glenn Weinberg, but you won't find the manager I report to, the senior manager he reports to, or the director he reports to (who in turn reports to Glenn).) Perhaps it will just take time and growing numbers above and below to squeeze them out of the conference rooms and out here with the rest of us...
Recently, the gap has closed, with the two directors our group works for starting blogs — Andy Roach of the Solaris x86 group, and Stephen Harpster of the OpenSolaris effort. (At Sun, we find org charts that look like the traditional tree form to be boring, so ours are much more complex graphs, which is why my boss reports to two directors - a "solid line" report and a "dotted line" report.)
They're not the only new blogs springing up on blogs.sun.com though, and there's a bunch of new ones from those of us working down in the trenches, digging through the code. Those I'm particularly watching:
- Jay Cotton
- If all you had to go on was e-mail, you might think he's one of the quieter members of Sun's X11 team, but no one who has met him in person would make that mistake. Jay has done a lot of work on Xsun's Xinerama and power management code, and most recently has been working on delivering the Xorg 6.8.2 server for the Linux release of Sun's Java Desktop System.
- What's Brewing by Randy Fishel
- Randy works around the corner from me, and we chat a lot in the hall. I'm never quite sure what he's working on because he's got his fingers in so many parts of Solaris - the webmin packages included in Solaris 10, the initial JDS release for Solaris x86 last year, network drivers, power management, and every time I look it seems like he's working on something new. And when he's not talking about what he's cooking up next for Solaris, he'll tell you about the beer he's brewing.
- OS Technology by Tim Marsland
- The architect of the Solaris AMD64 port, he's now writing a series of posts about how that was done.
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