Retirement: A stage of life when you are able to invest time without being constrained by the need to earn a salary. It becomes easier to pursue things that you think are truly worthwhile without having to make compromises. It’s possible to be “retired” and be working a job that pays you a salary if you aren’t dependent on keeping the salary.

I expect people who read my Midlife Reset Revisited post wouldn’t be surprise that I retired July 29, 2022. My wife Jackie has been encouraging me to embrace “life” as discussed in the classic book Your Money or Your Life and not worry so much about money. It’s time to invest in what I find truly life giving. My desire is to spend more time thinking about the “human heart” and mind, less about technology. To have more time to invest in my family, local community, neighborhood, church, and some NGOs I have periodically assisted. I want to live rest of my life with wisdom, leveraging all I have learned and experienced so far investing into other people as described by Richard Rohr in Falling Upward and Arthur Brooks in Strength to Strength. I nearly made this transition 10 years ago, but I flinched.

I originally thought post retirement I would completely pull away from technology, but that hasn’t happened. I have been coaching / mentoring former coworkers, students and young professionals I have met during my travels. I have also been advising some worthwhile companies. I have found this energizing. I started to reconsider spending more time in the “work world”, using my experience to build products and services which lead to human flourishing.

I have been working in technology for 43 years: something like 100k “work hours” and 30k hours in meeting?! My workplaces have included two universities, Xerox PARC, and seven startups, five of which “succeeded” by going public or by being acquired by Google or Microsoft. Along the way we built some remarkable systems and some wonderful friendships. I had the joy of mentoring numerous students and employees.

I spent most of my career in what is now called SRE or DevSecOps with a dash of platform engineering and developer experience: an engineering approach to problems at the intersection of development, security and operations. Along the way I often was responsible for my organization’s classic IT. 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 thing 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 had the privilege of working with some extraordinary people such as John Giannandrea who made me a better engineer annd leader. I got to experience life in several great institutions. I had a front row seat to major technological changes… sometimes helping the changes along.

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. It’s gratifying to see how the ideas developed in the ROC, RADlab, Tier, and like projects have spread. 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. Much of our work stood on the shoulders of giants from 1960s and 1970s which still provides guidance such as Butler Lampson’s Hints for Computer System Design.

To be effective in most technical fields required many hours outside “work hours” invested in continual learning. Every 4-5 years there seems to be a new technology or approach to learn and master. Until recently I had enjoyed expanding my “systems” mastery. A signal that it was time to make a change was that I was happy to spend time learning about most any topic but distributed systems. I knew it would be useful to refresh my knowledge of container orchestration, to learn about Raft even though I paid the cost to understand Paxos, etc. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yet I was eager to be reading about economics, sociology, theology, striving to understand the Krebs cycle… oh my, so much to learn, so few years left.

I also started to notice how much of my mindspace work took: the time spent in showers, on walks, in the middle of longer bike rides, and those nights I couldn’t sleep thinking about how to advance our field or overcome a challenge at work. Rather than being energizing as it had been, it was feeling like a burden.

Short Term Changes / Projects

Health: I am step up my exercise and physical activity. More running, get back to strength training, more backpacking, and join Jackie learning Tai Chi. Catch up on medical appointments and getting work on having a healthy and fit life.

Learning: Took some classes at Foothill college (psychology, history). Found a mismatch between what I already know and the material in the class. In the future classes only make sense if I know nothing. One thing I realized is that there are more books I want to read than I have years left. I am going to focus on reading what I think will be valuable, and not feel compelled to finish a book just because I started it.

Connections: Visited family than I rarely see and meet some family members I have never met. I will have more time to spend with people from our church and neighborhood. We have people over for dinner twice a week. Groups of six are really great. If you have 8 or more you might end up with multiple conversations. Now that I have more slack I am going to restart the “whose my neighbor?” experiment that I did when I took a sabbatical from work ten years ago.

Contemplation: Make space to listen to my heart, to God, and to the people around me. Being more intentionally grateful, and more attentive to what’s happening around me, and living more in the moment. More consistent in my prayer life, and working through some material about pilgrimages and personal transformation in preparation for walking the Camino De Santiago, aka The Way of Saint James.

Medium Term

Travel: Continued our nomad experiment for a few years to figure out what would a home base been for the next season of life. Santa Cruz, Taipei, Portland, San Jose Costa Rica, Lisbon, Las Vegas, etc. We spent 1+ month “scouting” locations, followed by 6 months in places that were top of our list.

Walk the ~500 mile Frances Camino in May 2023

Close out work lessons: Over the years I have made notes about all I have learned about building reliable systems. I abandoned turning my notes into finished documents years ago… but I know some people who are working on formalizing something similar. Maybe with a bit of a break from technology and management I will have enough interest to put just a bit more time into my old field.

Long Term

The general vector is to get better at loving God, loving neighbors and growing in faith. The specifics are still in process. My current page will give a brief snapshot of whatever is top of mind right now.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I Corinthians 13:4-13 (ESV)