Yesterday I gave notice to my manager that my last day at IBM would be November 15th. I’ve accepted a job with Isilon in Seattle and start on November 16th.
It was a hard choice leaving IBM. My manager, Woody, is wonderful, professional and personable. The entire ITIM team, from management, architects, development, test, support, services, and sales are all a real class act and I’ve enjoyed working with every one of them. But after ~7 years working on ITIM and ~10.5 years at IBM, it’s time to move on to something else.
I’ve seen ITIM grow from a blue-washed acquisition that didn’t scale all that well to a robust enterprise-level product that easily supports millions of users. IBM and the ITIM team allowed me to craft my own job description (my title has always been “Performance Peon” to anyone who asked) and in essence do whatever it is that I thought needed to be done. I’ve been empowered to work with customers both directly and indirectly through L2/L3 support. I’ve influenced ITIM product architecture and design goals. I’ve published, with virtually no supervision, a performance tuning document that is the first line of defense for our customers when performance issues arise. (According to the stats, the tuning guide in its various editions and versions was downloaded 1043 times last month and 26,216 times total since the first release in June 2006!) Heck, I’ve even sweet-talked developers into fixing bad grammar in configuration file comments!
It’s been a fun ride but it’s time to play in a different amusement park.
More details and ramblings about this to follow.
Digital Ramblings 
Congrats! Glad to finally see this public. :)
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