I started with computers when I was 14 and became a computer professional at age 17 when I wrote a real-time multi-tasking operating system for ship, pipeline and refinery control while attending Tulane University in New Orleans.
From there, at 19 I passed on jobs at Apple and Microsoft (in '83) to join Digital Equipment Corporation where I helped found two support businesses for them.
I then joined Relational Technology Inc. (later Ingres Corp), and, as a direct report to the Sr. VP of Sales, performed just about every technical role in the company, curriculum development, consulting, technical support, development, benchmarking, created Demos, represented the company at trade shows, etc, and I even helped sell the product.
After a while as an independent consultant, Professor Michael Stonebraker invited me to lead a research team at UC Berkeley's Electronics Research Laboratory wherein I developed the world's first "Grid" computing system - which was also the first truly heterogeneous distributed computing system, today known as "cloud computing."
In '97 I commercialized the work and founded several companies where today I have a split life as "executive" and technical wizard - in short, I serve as chief cook _and_ bottle washer. I'm a jack of trades, and specialize in computing performance and heterogeneity with an eye toward production work, stability, maintainability and up-time performance.
