Six years ago I took a UNIX system administration job with a large telecommunication firm in Atlanta. About a month into the job, my boss asked me to chat with one of the UNIX admins about a DNS server that needed to brought back online. I had never spoken with this specific admininstrator, so I wandered over to his cube not knowing what to expect. When I arrived at his cube, I introduced myself, and we started chatting about the DNS server. He told me about the events that led to the box being taken out of rotation, and mentioned that he had a plan to bring the server back online. I thanked him for his time, and wandered back to my cube. This was the first time I met Clay.
Since our environment was super busy, I was usually tucked away in a cube building servers, responding to ecache parity errors, and reviving broken NAS and CORBA servers. One day my boss asked me to provision several domains on one of the companies Sun Enterprise 10000s. This was an emergency request, and I knew I needed a good plan in order to complete the request in the time alloted to me. About an hour or so into writing up the tasks, Clay stopped by my cube to see if he could use the Sun Enterprise 10000s for a few days. I asked him if he had a truck, to which he smiled and said he was planning to be the first to boot Linux on a Sun Enterprise 10000. At first I thought he was joking, but the look on his face indicated that he was serious. Since it was Friday afternoon and I didn’t have to have the hardware online until the following week, I gave Clay the SSP passwords, described the layout of the SSP, and wished him luck. Once I finished my battle plan, I wandered home for the weekend.
When I returned to work on Monday, Clay stopped by my cube to return some items. I asked him if he made any progress on booting Linux on the Sun Enterprise 10000, to which he mellowly replied “yeah, but we couldn get the graphical penguins to display since the Sun Enterprise 10000 doesn’t have a frame buffer.” Once I realized that he had actually gotten the Linux kernel to boot on the Sun Enterprise 10000, my jaw dropped, and the “wow, I know someone famous” feeling hit me. This was exciting stuff, and when Clay left my cube, I thought to myself, “damn this dude is smart!”
Things continued to tick along at the job, and my boss stopped by my cube one day to assign me a new project. He also asked me to discuss the project with the senior manager of architecture. Since the architecture manager sat on the opposite side of the building, I got up from my seat and wandered over to chat with him. When we finished chatting, I started to walk back to my cube, and happened to notice that Clay and another co-worker were staring inquisitively at their computers. I wandered over to see how they were doing, and asked what they were up to. Clay looked up from his display and mentioned that he was trying to debug a problem with a commercial web server. I noticed that his monitor was littered with debuggers and commented SPARC assembly code, and he had created a variety of diagrams on his white board. I was impressed with what I saw, and was even more amazed when I heard that they had developed a web server plugin to solve the problem the company had encountered.
I eventually promoted into the same group as Clay, and was moved into a cube adjacent to his. Since Clay was aways working on solving super complex and sometimes mind boggling problems, it was always fun wandering next door to see what he was up to. Regardless of the size or shape of the problem, I quickly learned that Clay could solve whatever you threw at him ( super complex problems typically required more than one package of chocolate donuts). So when Clay told me two weeks ago that he planned to compete in the competition to boot Windows XP on the Mac, I knew he would be able to win, especially once he drew out his solution on the back of a sushi menu.
After two weeks of hacking code and getting 90% of his solution written, Clay learned that narf and blanka had submitted a solution to boot Windows XP on a Mac. Once Clay got confirmation that their solution was submitted to the competition’s creator, Clay congratulated the winners, and posted the solution he had concocted to the Windows XP on mac message board. While Clay might not have won the competition, he is first in my book ( /me pours out his 40 of OE to Clay)! Congrats dude, and awesome work!