Ten years later....

Walking into the building today after yoga, I caught the strong odor of burnt toast. This reminded me of an... incident I had when I started here ten years ago while trying to get a bagel *extra* toasty. I started here in January 1997, just as the Internet boom was starting to ramp up. At Sun, we still got free bagels and donuts once a week - heck, I can't remember if it was on Tuesday or Wednesday anymore! These donuts and bagels were a BIG incentive to get into the office early, otherwise you'd miss out on the deep fried delicious snacks.

Fresh out of school, I would arrive here at the office, dressed business casual, at about 8:30AM. One morning (a Tuesday or Wednesday), I was toasting my bagel & decided to toast it twice (as the first time it came out a bit underdone). The smell of burning bread alerted me to trouble, and I reached into the toaster oven to try to retrieve my bagel. After burning my hand trying to grab the incredibly hot doughy delight, I tried reaching in again with a paper towel... Even though the element was off, it was still hot enough to catch that paper towel on fire. Oops! Quickly, I dropped the paper towel in the sink & turned on the water. Waited a minute, then retrieved my now overdone bagel and sulked back to my office. Embarrassed by my rookie bagel move, I was still relieved that Sun engineering is a late rising bunch, so nobody else witnessed my bagel flambe.

Looking back on the last ten years, I've been all of the following:

• Novice
• Solaris Test Collection Gatekeeper
• JavaVM, GreenThreads & Javadoc tester
  
• Firewall novice
• Sustaining Engineer
• Patch creator
• Chief complainer about SunScreen's NAT facility
• Architect and developer of new NAT in SunScreen EFS 3.0
• SNMP expert
• Tweaker of all things stateful in SunScreen
• Documentation reviewer & sometimes writer
  
• Bug princess
  
• IPQoS Novice
• CIM/Wbem novice
• ON novice
  
• IPsec novice
• Userland cryptoframework component designer & implementor
• Test developer for PKCS#11 components
• Bug queen
• BoF organizer
  
• Solaris update release tech lead
• ON CRT
  
• Chief receiver of complaints about update releases & patches
• Open Solaris sponsor
• Open Solaris sponsor.. sponsor
• Smartcard novice
  
• Crypto export rule enforcer
• Fixing code I wrote many moons ago... geez, why didn't I comment that code?!?! Who wrote these lousy man pages?!? I did?!? Oh, well, then... I guess they aren't that bad. ;-)
  

Here's to a great ten years at an incredible company where I've had many different jobs (only one job change actually involved an interview), and even more roles. I've learned you can't be just one thing here at Sun, you must take multiple roles, do multiple tasks, and keep learning. There's always more room on your plate - there has to be. It's how we grow, both as a company and as individuals.

Here's hoping for a few more good years here! Who knows what jobs or roles I'll be doing next year?