About

This is my personal website. So who am I? I am a husband, father, son, and brother to my family. I am a person of faith who strives to embrace love and truth which grows best in community. I spent my career in high-tech (mostly start-ups) near the bleeding edge of distributed / high performance computing. I am mostly retired, but still do a bit of coaching and advising.

I think society can be best judged by how it treats those with the least power. I want to make a difference, and leave the world in better shape than how I found it. As a systems thinker I believe that the world is complex with many inter-connections: small changes can often make an outsized impact. I love how simplicity and beauty have a positive impact on design and life.

I strive to live a healthy and fit lifestyle which includes spending as much time as I can outdoors: bicycling, running, hiking, and backpacking. I am driven by my curiosity and love learning. I enjoy traveling, reading, photography, and am a bit of an audiophile.

I have been leading groups, within my local church, non profits, and in my workplace since since I was a teenager. My leadership style was strongly influence by Greenleaf’s model of servant leadership. I empower not micro-manage, persuade rather than dictate. I focus on equipping people. I believe people are most effective when they are driven by intrinsically motivate as described in Dan Pink’s book Drive.

I spent most of my career in what is now called SRE or DevSecOps with a dash of platform engineering: an engineering approach to problems at the intersection of development, security and operations. When I started my career we called it systems programming. My teams build efficient, reliable, secure systems which didn’t require toil to maintain. I developed the architecture for several systems that had “good bones”, where the initial design was able to adapt to changing requirements. I am most proud of the service I co-architected with Brad Porter at Tellme Networks. In less that a year we built a system which achieve 99.995% serviceability and continued to achieve this for >15 years. This architecture continued to guide Tellme through numerous technologies changes while the traffic grew three orders of magnitude and the company cycled through several generations of staff. The best known things I worked on was what became the Google Knowledge graph which provides those using “Info Boxes” on the right side of your search results.

I am very gratitude to have been part of research communities at The Ohio State University, PARC, and Stanford. I had the privilege to be an industry advisor to several research programs at UC Berkeley led by amazing people including David Paterson, Randy Katz, and Ian Stoica. A great deal of wisdom that has been uncovered in the academic and research community is unknown by many practitioners. I encourage people to read classic systems papers, apply design thinking, and use the scientific method. My favorite coworker and manager was JG.

This website was started in 1990 and continued to be hand edited HTML until 2018 when I decided to convert it to WordPress.  Many of my “new” posts are really old content that is finally being updated. I used to tweet things I find interesting but I won’t support Elon’s version of Twitter.

If you have questions, comments, etc please drop me a note. My email is “mark” at this site’s domain name.