I'm a server and infrastructure guy with a penchant for the big picture and a lifelong love of technology.

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Ask me about my homelab, and ignore the huge backlog of projects. I've redone my home networks for the end of my Meraki licenses, then switched back. I've worked in networking and storage although it's been a little while. I have never been a developer. I've never waited tables (even database tables) but respect those who do. I admit what I don't know and learn quickly. 

Today I'm an engineering product manager for UCS networking in the compute business at Cisco. 

From 2022-2023 I was product line manager for software management products at Supermicro. 

From 2018-2020 I focused on channel partner enablement, partner sales engineering, solutions engineering at Cisco. 

From 2014-2018 I played storyteller/matchmaker between big data ISVs, Cisco channel partners and internal sales teams, and occasionally a customer or 100. I've been doing big data since late 2003/early 2004 (really) and Hadoop since probably 2008 (CDH1). I presented at partner events and public conferences including Strata+Hadoop World (2x) and Cisco Live (4x, Distinguished Speaker). 

On the first day at Cisco (right after lunch), I pushed a half million dollar deal over the edge with my personal experience outweighing a competitor's positioning. From then on, I brought context and proportion to challenging situations, helping our customers succeed and our sales teams make money. I believe those two should not be mutually exclusive, and I consider it my mission to bring them together wherever I work. 

Before Cisco, I was a senior level Silicon Valley systems operations professional with nearly 20 years (different years, even) of production UNIX system administration in multiple varieties of UNIX (Solaris, Linux, BSD) as well as experience in other desktop and server platforms. I built a proven history of delivering enterprise class scalable server, network, and DR/BC environments within stringent budget and time restraints.

I blog at rsts11.com and rsts11travel.com. 

Specialties: Big data platforms, hardware, and education; system administration, hardware planning and management (even clouds need hardware), Hadoop, written English (documentation is our friend), UNIX-based email systems, coffee preparation & procurement, operations team building and sustaining. 

I'm not a developer or coder although I can read or tweak some code. I don't have an MBA or a PhD. 

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Robert Novak

I just posted a cluster deployment walk-through on the Cisco Community site, rolling out Proxmox VE 9.1 from Proxmox Server Solutions on the Cisco UCS X210c M7 modular servers. 

It was a fun and productive effort, having not touched Intersight for the larger part of the last decade. Next up in the time machine recovery, I'll be writing up Ceph deployment on VE 9.1 after about 13 years away from Ceph (I last used it on Cisco UCS C220 M3S at Disney Interactive in 2013 or so, trying to deal with Tanenbaum's Law and a datacenter migration). 

Are you running Proxmox VE on Cisco UCS? Tell me what's going on in the comments.

🚝Robert Novak

Open article: Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers by community.cisco.com

Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers

So last month I learned that my Lenovo Thinkstation P360 won't drive an eGPU on the TB4 ports. 

Last night I learned that my Intel NUC10i7FNH1 won't drive an eGPU on the TB3 ports, or when it does, it interferes with the NVMe drive (and possibly SATA, although that might have just been an 8 year old 60GB SSD finally dying). 

Apple Silicon Macs don't seem to care for NVIDIA GPUs, from what I read, so I haven't even tried that. 

But my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 (nice little Xeon laptop) seemed okay with the eGPU. 

I'm so tired.

Who wouldn't want to go through a new account process for every application in the same platform, manually entering your resume after uploading it, realizing no human will ever look at more than 5 words of it? 

Been there, done that.

Paddy Jobsman | Helping creators + brands grow with memes & creative content | 1M+ social media followers across two brands

>saw the perfect job to apply for
>workday application

All around Software Engineer. Embedded software/hardware specialist, but I've also done full-stack web development. All aspects of software development from concept to release, including architecture, design, implementation, test and support.

Well-versed in aspects of HW design.  Have worked as part of several successful cross-functional teams on the co-design of new HW/SW from the systems level down to the chip level (ASIC, FPGA, COTS). Have participated on a number of ASIC projects in the areas of testability and RAS functionality, as well as the subsequent SW support thereof.

Especially interested in (and a strong contributor on) "bleeding edge" projects.  Like to do proof-of-concept and rapid prototyping where no forerunner exists.

Specialties: Low level code development.  HW design/functional verification.  HW/SW bring-up, BSP development, embedded OS / RTOS integration.

Previously held clearances: DOD Secret, DOE Q w/SRD

Richard Rauscher

Seen it and lived it. I used to say, “I love what I do, I just hate my job “.

Fractional CIO & Strategic Advisor | Helping Non-Technical Leaders Make Technical Decisions | Scaled Orgs from $0 to $3B+

The best engineer on the team hadn't shipped a single feature she was proud of in fourteen months.

Elena used to prototype solutions on Saturday mornings because the problems were interesting. She'd sketch architecture diagrams on napkins at lunch. Her tech lead at her previous company once told her she thought about systems the way musicians think about melody. Patterns inside patterns.

Then she got a new engineering manager.

Code reviews became public dissections. Not "walk me through your thinking." More like "why would you do it this way?" with the emphasis on would. Every bug was a verdict. Every missed estimate was evidence. He once rejected a PR with seven comments, all variations of "this isn't how we do things here," without once explaining how they did things there.

So Elena adapted. She stopped proposing better architectures. Stopped questioning requirements that didn't make sense. She started building exactly what was specified, even when she knew it was wrong, because "wrong but approved" was safer than "right but challenged."

Fourteen months of that.

When she transferred teams, her new manager pulled up her first PR and said five words: "Walk me through your thinking here."
Elena froze. She'd been so conditioned to defend that she forgot what it felt like to be asked to explain.

So she explained. Tentatively. Waiting for the critique. It didn't come. Instead: "That's a clever approach to the caching layer. Have you considered extending it to handle the edge case on write-back?"

A real technical conversation. Not a performance review disguised as collaboration.

Three months later, Elena was leading the design review for their highest-priority feature. Six months after that, two junior engineers asked to be on her projects because, as one of them put it, "I actually learn things."

She didn't become a different engineer when she switched teams. She just stopped flinching.

That's what bad management does to good people. It doesn't reduce their talent. It teaches them to hide it. And the worst part is how invisible the damage looks from the outside. The code still ships. The standups still happen. The sprint velocity looks fine on a dashboard.

But the napkin sketches stop. The Saturday prototypes stop. The interesting questions stop.

And nobody notices until she's gone.

♻️ Repost if you've watched a great engineer go quiet under the wrong manager 

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on building engineering cultures where talent stays visible

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