nick.org

At this moment, I feel very uncertain about the future of my career. I have visions of where I want it to go, but no definitive plans. Quite honestly, I don't even know if that vision is what I want or just want I think I want. In the meantime, the clock continues to tick...

In March of this year, I stepped outside of engineering at Isilon. Moving into product management has been a very enlightening and enjoyable experience in general, but its also been very difficult - I'm in completely uncharted waters. As an engineer, I wrote code. As a manager, I made sure others wrote code. Code makes things work. When code doesn't work, you point at the code. You can point at that code and say, look - I made that happen.

My world is different today - I deal with sales, competitors, ideas, products, engineers - but not code. I've gone from having "hard power" and being able to produce tangible things to "soft power" - I can influence, encourage, advocate, and dream. I'm much less familiar with the work that I produce; it is much harder for me to recognize it has my own.

The original vision in my head was that this move would prepare me for moving to graduate school and ultimately academia by forcing me into an ambiguous world. In addition, I would once again be an individual contributor, but one forced to learn a new skill set and to see many different aspects of business, not to mention customer's and the industry's challenges first-hand. Obviously, I don't want to leave Isilon yet.

I think it's doing all that. The transition has allowed me to focus more on Jerry and Eriko. I do enjoy being an individual contributor, even if I'm not always sure how to make things happen or what steps to take next.

I know my next move. I have to remind myself again, again, again - Jerry and Eriko. That's why I'm in this transitional state and not just jumping to the next branch. Having to make deliberate, calculated moves isn't a bad things. Learning patience is a good thing.

Change is unsettling! The challenge is that I don't really know if its going my way, even if its going my way... but then I realize that the one thing is that is absolutely true is that I feel very comfortable being a husband and a father - that transition has been far more natural than I expected. I'll know when I've landed on my future career when I feel similar.

Zack had been prompting me to read this for some time, so I took it with on my trip to Texas last week. It turned out to be very easy and engaging reading and I finished it on the flight down. Reading Wil's blog entries and then his own commentary on the blogs was interesting. I have found a very similiar duality or "show" which occurs in my own writing.

When I first started this blog, I was writing it for me - my earliest entries are intimate, revealing, and sometimes "inappropriate." As my audience appeared and it became clear that Eriko, my parents, my siblings, and other relatives were reading the blog I found myself altering the type of content and presentation.

No longer do I write an entry as a stream of consciousness in a vacuum - I'm very aware of the "audience" watching. At the same time, my life has changed so much, most of my content has become less brash; there is no need for such bravado - gone are the days of political and international conspiracy theories (who has time for that), the partying (day after is too painful), and the women (one is very much enough, thank you).

My entries are focused on career and my family. I find it fitting that this matched Wil's transition as well - he is my role model for the "goals" page on nick.org.

Less than 3 years ago, I was the proud owner of a fully populated entertainment center/bookshelf. This is not one of those small pieces of furniture, mind you, but at least 10 feet in length and 8 feet tall.

I love information - I'm essentially an information pack rat, although as you'll see, that is changing. I've kept most of my books from college - especially my math and computer science books. I really (read never) have time to read them, but just seeing them on the shelves takes me back to a time where I was younger, smarter, and more in control. =)

First came Eriko. I gave up 25% of the bookshelf as soon as her stuff began to arrive from Nagoya. There was some creative maneuvering and I ended up with more shelf space, by far.

Then came Jerry. At first, the impact was minor. A shelf for his toys. Then two. Then a shelf for his books. Then two. Then another shelf for his toys. Then another for his books.

I put quite a few of my books in storage - all the "duplicate" (or redundant) materials, or the ones of least interest to me - but I still kept quite a few CS, math, and economics books - not to mention my collection of Dr. Dobb's
magazines (which were doubling as a barrier to accessing the power cords.)

As of last Sunday, I was down to slightly less than 50% of the total space - but looking around the room, at the proliferation of toys and books, I finally bent to the forces of family.

I boxed up all my magazines (Dr. Dobbs and the Economist) and literature books, moved all of my CS books to work (where they probably won't be read either, but I wasn't using those bookshelves), and consolidated my math, economics, and Japanese language books onto a single shelf.

The funny thing is that I find the event quite freeing. I can't count how many evenings I would grab one of those CS books, read a page or two, and feel tortured - I couldn't spend time with it but I couldn't leave it alone. This reminds me of the time, in our condominium garage, when one of my neighbors came up to me. I was "working" on the MG and she said "when are you going to grow up and just get rid of this thing? You should be using this space for the car you park on the street."

She's right - I knew it then and I know it now, but I still haven't given up that car (and I still entertain ideas about converting it into an electric car for Jerry). I don't have too many things left to go. =)

nick.org - down! After almost four years of no unscheduled downtime, nick.org came to a screeching halt Sunday. I noticed an email from my brother, Kevin, indicating that I had farked something up. "That's weird", I thought, "it was working fine last night." I went to the website and found it very unavailable, with nothing but a strange Apache directory listing. I attempted to ssh and found that it was unavailable too. Uh oh. I happened to be talking to my parents via Skype at the time (it was Mother's day) and juggling Jerry on my knee.

"I've been hacked" - was my first instinct. I started to look at other sites that I'm hosting and found other strange Apache error messages. Oh no. I continued to talk to my parents, figuring that I couldn't do much about it now - but I let them know what was going on. My dad is very committed to his online journal and I didn't want to disappoint his adoring fans for long.

I continued to poke around and found some log entries (sent via remote syslog) that indicated a hardware failure of some sort. A double device failure? Oh no - data loss! I grew more uncomfortable and decided I needed to tend to this now. Eriko wanted to go downtown for some shopping and it took us a few minutes to get ourselves and Jerry ready.

At the data center, I was confronted with a RAID controller which had gone out to lunch. I power-cycled the machine and it believed all the disks were still part of the RAID5 group - but once it started quotascan, the controller locked again. My experiences at Isilon have given me quite a bit of knowledge into how drives and controllers fail, so I decided to see if I could identify which drive (if it were a drive) that was causing the problem. I rebooted again and sat and watched the drive lights. Blink, blink, blink, stop. Drive 5. Stuck.

I pulled out drive 5 and rebooted. Success! I immediately rsynced a backup copy of the data. The sites I'm hosting are mainly read-only, besides uploading pictures, blog entries, or the log files from the websites themselves but I hadn't yet setup an automated backup mechanism on this new server.

I left the data center with the server in a WOR (window of risk) and headed home, glad that I had at least restored service for the time being.

On Monday, I returned to the data center with another drive. To my dismay, the RAID controller believed it was 250.9 GB instead of 251 GB. Argh! Reallocations! My only option was to switch to the RAID1 set (which is the boot disk) so that the data isn't at risk. I'll rsync to the RAID5 set as well as a remote location, which will provide some buffer until I can obtain another disk.

Here's a shameless plug for Isilon - but boy would I have loved to have an Isilon cluster. I could have a lost a head w/o making the data unavailable, and I would be able to reprotect the data (at the expense of free space, which I have plenty of) without having to immediately replace a drive. This suits me, the busy (part-time) storage administrator, to a T. The experience left me even more convinced that our product is light-years ahead of anything else.

Jerry turned two today. Eriko and I are both amazed at how quickly the time has passed and how much he has grown. I'll post some pictures as soon as I upload them.

• The happy family.


• The cake eater!

http://twitter.com/nkirsch

(I'm recording this for posterities sake, not due to excitement.)

After a long period of deliberation, ups and downs, excitement and confusion, I've decided to move into a new position. The things that I enjoy most about being a director of software engineering are the things that could have made me great at the position but not destined to stay there - the ability to be involved in all aspects of the product, to comment on virtually every specification and product decision, to help set direction and provide vision, to be hands-on and technical, and to be patient yet firm.

That said, I didn't enjoy trying to mentor my direct reports, build an organization, rank people around me - essentially, all the aspects of management. Perhaps if I had a better mentor, or if my peers hadn't bailed on me, or if I would have had the control over the direction like I imagined, or if I would have just been more patient... I would have been able to weather through the uncertainty of my own growth - but the more I analyzed where I was and where I was heading, the more I had a hard time being able to picture myself in middle management for years to come.

Starting next week, I'll be moving into product marketing. I don't know what to expect! I'm a little anxious about my new team, my new role, my new boss... I have high hopes and expectations - that this move will give me a much broader view of the organization, the industry, and the technology. I'll be in a position where I can strongly shape the product but not spend my time on the factory floor. Of course, this comes with "drawbacks" as well - more travel, less technical conversations (with peers, partners, etc.), less pay...

The best thing about this move is that I won't be leaving behind the people I've spent the last 5.5 years with. They'll be on the same floor, right around the corner, in the same building - we'll still be working on the same product and in the same discussions. I'll be the same... but different.

Eriko and I went to see Jake at the Jazz Alley on Monday. I had absolutely no idea what to expect and I was blown away by what Jake can do with a ukulele.

Check these out:

• while my guitar weeps gently
• crazy g
• me and shirley t
• going to california