Life

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New

August 12, 2009 in Life by jc | No comments

After a very long hiatus, I feel like I have more to share, and decided to do some summer cleanup on this blog. This post is the first since a long time, many things have changed:

  • I am changing hosting. I was squatting a friend’s collocation, and need to move out. I want to thank Fred for all the resources I used and everything I’ve learned in the process.
  • I’m switching from Pebble to Wordpress. I really liked Pebble, it served me well, I learned a lot, but Java hosting is harder to find. By the way,  I admire Pebble’s author, Simon Brown. If you have a chance, stop by his site. I wish I could move to Jersey too.
  • I’ve changed employer. I’m now working at eBay, as an architect responsible for the datacenter automation area, and the implementation of cloud properties on the site. More on that later.
  • I lost weight, a lot of it (50 pounds), and I’ve  rowed 2 half marathons (indoor), and recently ran one (outdoor). Occasionally, I’ll post about this here too.

I think that’s it.  I hope to be able to post more than I did in the past two years, at least before going through more changes.

New job

October 10, 2006 in Job, Life by jc | No comments

After a long break of more than a month, it is time to contribute an entry to this blog. This break coincide also with a change of employer. After 11 years with Sun, working on projects like Solstice Bandwidth Allocator, Solaris Bandwidth Manager, and the IPQOS feature of Solaris 10 (well, 9 8/03 more exactly), and more recently on N1, the change is really welcomed.

I’m joining BMC Software to look after the architecture and technical strategy of the Datacenter Management Solutions. This sounds really exiting as BMC has already all the components required to manage the full lifecycle of datacenter infrastructure, applications and services. Bringing together the Remedy Service Management , BMC Atrium CMDB , and Marimba product lines into consistent solutions has the potential to solve many of the challenges I have described in this previous post.

As before, I’ll try to be as much as possible impartial, and will speak only for me, and not BMC, remember :

The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer,
not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary altogether.

Sources of yahoo! job candidates

August 19, 2006 in Job by jc | No comments

According to Libby Sartain, Chief People Yahoo!, in an interview with Guy Kawasaky, the sources of successful candidates are as follow:

Candidate found listing on Yahoo Jobs page—30%

Yahoo employee referred the candidate—30%

Yahoo internal recruiter contacted a prospect (that is, the person wasn’t looking)—20%

Yahoo retained headhunter contacted a prospect (that is, the person wasn’t looking)—2%

Conversion from contractor or temporary—10%

Hot Jobs and other jobs sites—7%

The most interesting piece of information here is the 30% coming from Yahoo Jobs page. It seems to contradict some of the information floating in books, but also seems to point out that the key is to have the resume associated with an existing requisition.

New Brighton State Beach

July 17, 2006 in Life by jc | No comments

Saturday was spent at New Brighton State Beach near Capitola. While it was a very nice day, it started with quite a bit of fog. The light was very nice, and the resulting picture looks like chinese painting, … well, almost :-)

DSC_4068

Scary statistics about book reading

July 13, 2006 in Life by jc | No comments

I stumbled on Rich Burridge’s weblog post about book statistics, it has some scary numbers :

Who is Reading Books (and who is not)

One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.

42% of college graduates never read another book.

80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.

70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57% of new books are not read to completion.

58% and 42% ?!?!? how is that possible !

Offshoring and the impact on IT sourcing

May 29, 2006 in Job by jc | No comments

It seems that the trend of IT offshoring policies is starting to impact the availability of US trained IT professionals. It’s no surprise. Not only students are not willing to face the fate of having their job moved to a low cost location, but now, engineers are starting to move out of the job, mainly into Marketing, it seems (I would be interested to know how many seasoned developers are attending MBA schools these days …).
Robert Mitchell seems to disagree that students contemplating an IT job should be put off by offshoring. In an article, he says :

globalization is an opportunity … placing key human resources closer to customers in each market.

I don’t really think that this is the reason why jobs are offshored in the first place …

How to be a better blogger …

May 29, 2006 in Job by jc | No comments

Computer world has a nice article on how to be a better blogger … and still keep your day job … David Strom says :

  • Tell the truth
  • find your voice, and stick to it
  • be professional at all times
  • craft your own blogging policy now
  • understand the mechanic, and know your tools

For me, blogging is not about promoting my employer’s technology. Even though I think that our technology is really cool. It’s one of the reasons why my blog is not on the corporate site. I would like to make sure that I’m perceived as objective, and provide a forum that is transcending a specific employer, and will evolve with me, not attached to a specific job.

Goals

May 26, 2006 in Job by jc | No comments

Often, during performance evaluation periods, career development assessment, one has to define long term goals, how to get there, and more importantly, how to track progress.

While I don’t like too much self help type of books or articles, and not that Tom Peters is in that business, but I found in one of his articles a very interesting paragraph:

No matter what you’re doing today, there are four things you’ve got to measure yourself against. First, you’ve got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you’ve got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you’ve got to be a broad-gauged visionary — a leader, a teacher, a farsighted “imagineer.” Fourth, you’ve got to be a businessperson — you’ve got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

I think that this is a very good start.

The Skull and Bones society stole Geronimo's skull !

May 16, 2006 in Life by jc | No comments

Trying to find some information about the fate of the 2006 De Anza Pow Wow (a very nice and small Pow Wow), I stumbled on an article posted in the New West state that “Geronimo Descendant Will Ask Bushes to Help Return Warrior’s Remains”.

I didn’t even know that it was stolen, but the stangest is the reference to the Skull and Bone Society

As Philippe Meyer (French author) used to say :
Nous vivons une epoque bien moderne.

Job Boom

May 4, 2006 in Life by jc | No comments

Seen on Business 2.0 blog

But now the tables have turned. An unusual convergence of economic factors has made this moment the best time to look for a job since the most dizzying days of the boom. A recent survey of more than 14,000 employees and human resources managers by compensation consultancy Salary.com found that fully 65 percent of workers planned to be hunting for a new job in early 2006.

That’s an interesting information …