Work
I work for Cisco Systems Inc as an IT Engineer. I’ve been working there about 6 years. I work in the group that maintains the company’s messaging systems backbone. I used to say “email” backbone, but in the age of converged technology, many other applications “ride on top of” email - so it’s more accurate to say “messaging”.
I fulfill a rather unique role within the organization that speaks to my hodgepodge background of education and interests. I was originally hired to do Engineering support. This group was, in short order, gobbled up by the general support organization. During this time my manager and I worked to establish certain ‘task silos’. One of these task silos was “Messaging and Calendaring”.
I began managing the case load within the messaging queue. During this time I quickly came up to speed on the architecture of our messaging systems and eventually became more and more comfortable with being more and more reckless, er, with delivering more new features into the environment.
Eventually I was able, with the help of the then-manage of the messaging group, to take advantage of an open head count requisition he had and thus I joined the team I’m working with today.
Through the next several years my task list changed often, but my group remained the same. I took my baby steps of Perl ( that I had learned in support land ) and turned those into real applications. I had great times with my colleagues and we enjoyed an era where the best of times went hand in hand with the worst of times.
And now here I am, many years later most of my colleagues have moved on to new jobs, new roles, new companies, but my skillset made it possible for me to be the most senior Unix / backbone research and development engineer. I write some applications, I write some interfaces, and I’m currently busy remodeling the entire mail alias distribution backbone architecture. And that, my friends, has more than enough little projects to keep me challenged for some time.
In addition, I’m really interested with convergence within different messaging platforms. Traditionally, my world was pure email and calendaring, now this technology can integrate with weblogs, RSS, podcasts, SIP-presence, call manager, et. al. There are so many new collaboration and messaging capabilities on the horizon I really love being where I am now with the skills I have now!
