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kirkcudbrightIt might be worth mentioning at some point what I've been doing for the last two weeks, and how it made me feel.
[Be warned that I wrote this, as everything I write here, primarily for my own benefit. It's long and full of irrelevant details, and deliberately omits crucial contextual details.]
Professional obligations took me up to the University of New Hampshire, for the Moonv6 IPv6 test-a-thon. This was a big cluster-fuck interopability test, with router vendors, OS vendors, and test equipment vendors. They built two of the largest (or at least most complex) OSPFv3 networks today, one at UNH, the other at a military site in Arizona, then connected them over a native IPv6 backbone link through Internet2 and DREN. They were even tunnelling v4 over v6 for their videoconferencing app.
But that's all geeky stuff.
The personal angle is that I've been feeling pretty detached, even alienated, from my job for a while. For several months before my sabbatical/bike trip, and more so since. For one thing, I'm the only one in the Nashua office who works on core IP technology; my boss and the rest of my group are in Alameda, California. At this point, there isn't a development manager in the company who doesn't have at least one remote report, but my manager has only one, and that's me. I've been working for him since January, and have yet to meet him face-to-face. In addition, I haven't been all that excited about what we're doing, and, particularly, what I'm doing.
Anyway, I wasn't keen on going to this Moonv6 thing, for a couple reasons that could have been remedied with a bit more motivation on my part. The test event organizers were not at all clear on their website, or in their email, about just what sort of thing this Thing was going to be. They were too busy planning the event to communicate their planning to people who weren't in on the planning. (I know several other organizations that work this way...) The test plan and rough schedule weren't released to the participants until 5 days before the start of event. At any time, I could have called the UNH lead, and said, "Ben, what is this Thing anyway?" But I didn't.
The other missing piece was on our side, within the company. Management said this as a good thing for us to participate in, but the only resources that were assigned to it were one engineer (me) and one board (a MIPS board, shipped to me from CA, not one I'd dealt with before, and, it turned out, not one that I had the tools to support. If I'd been more motivated in the part above, I would have had a better idea of what we needed to bring to the test event, and how it might benefit us, and I might have been able to put together a better demo system.
So, with this big unknown looming over the horizon, and this little unknown on the desk in front of me, I did what I usually do in such situations - I procrastinated and procrastinated until blind, paralyzing panic set in, and, with a sense of impending doom, I put something (anything!) together at the literal 11th hour.
The first day of testing was on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I'm not Jewish, but I did feel compelled to write my boss what started out to be an angsty email, atoning for my lack of preparation, and my failure to communicate said lack. Of course, it ended up being more balanced, with details of the testing so far.
The test plan, when it finally arrived, was written by the lead on the military side, so it was full of Requirements and Appendices and Annexes, and generally had a lot of throw weight. I don't know how stringently the test plan and the schedule were followed at JITC, but here at UNH, it was more about building and re-building the test network in increasingly more complex topologies. Some of the Asian and European telecom guys came over expressly to help them design a network that was both interesting and realistic. There's more geeky stuff I could say about it, but that's mostly for my trip report to my cow-orkers (excuse me, 'colleagues').
The point is that it was a collaborative, supportive environment, where we were just trying to see if we could all interoperate. To flush out the hidden assumptions and different interpretations of the standards. To trigger those conditions that just didn't happen back in the QA lab. Call me naive,but I'd never been to a big test event like this before.
From a personal standpoint, it reminded me that we actually do produce a product that does operate in real-world networks, which sometimes do some interesting and unusual things. Now I'm thinking about what we should bring to, and what we should test at phase 2 of the test, which will be in February. I'm motivated again, how about that.
Oh, and I have to hand it to the local catering company. In two weeks, we didn't have the same breakfast or lunch twice, and it was all uniformly good (not outstanding, but good).
[Be warned that I wrote this, as everything I write here, primarily for my own benefit. It's long and full of irrelevant details, and deliberately omits crucial contextual details.]
Professional obligations took me up to the University of New Hampshire, for the Moonv6 IPv6 test-a-thon. This was a big cluster-fuck interopability test, with router vendors, OS vendors, and test equipment vendors. They built two of the largest (or at least most complex) OSPFv3 networks today, one at UNH, the other at a military site in Arizona, then connected them over a native IPv6 backbone link through Internet2 and DREN. They were even tunnelling v4 over v6 for their videoconferencing app.
But that's all geeky stuff.
The personal angle is that I've been feeling pretty detached, even alienated, from my job for a while. For several months before my sabbatical/bike trip, and more so since. For one thing, I'm the only one in the Nashua office who works on core IP technology; my boss and the rest of my group are in Alameda, California. At this point, there isn't a development manager in the company who doesn't have at least one remote report, but my manager has only one, and that's me. I've been working for him since January, and have yet to meet him face-to-face. In addition, I haven't been all that excited about what we're doing, and, particularly, what I'm doing.
Anyway, I wasn't keen on going to this Moonv6 thing, for a couple reasons that could have been remedied with a bit more motivation on my part. The test event organizers were not at all clear on their website, or in their email, about just what sort of thing this Thing was going to be. They were too busy planning the event to communicate their planning to people who weren't in on the planning. (I know several other organizations that work this way...) The test plan and rough schedule weren't released to the participants until 5 days before the start of event. At any time, I could have called the UNH lead, and said, "Ben, what is this Thing anyway?" But I didn't.
The other missing piece was on our side, within the company. Management said this as a good thing for us to participate in, but the only resources that were assigned to it were one engineer (me) and one board (a MIPS board, shipped to me from CA, not one I'd dealt with before, and, it turned out, not one that I had the tools to support. If I'd been more motivated in the part above, I would have had a better idea of what we needed to bring to the test event, and how it might benefit us, and I might have been able to put together a better demo system.
So, with this big unknown looming over the horizon, and this little unknown on the desk in front of me, I did what I usually do in such situations - I procrastinated and procrastinated until blind, paralyzing panic set in, and, with a sense of impending doom, I put something (anything!) together at the literal 11th hour.
The first day of testing was on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I'm not Jewish, but I did feel compelled to write my boss what started out to be an angsty email, atoning for my lack of preparation, and my failure to communicate said lack. Of course, it ended up being more balanced, with details of the testing so far.
The test plan, when it finally arrived, was written by the lead on the military side, so it was full of Requirements and Appendices and Annexes, and generally had a lot of throw weight. I don't know how stringently the test plan and the schedule were followed at JITC, but here at UNH, it was more about building and re-building the test network in increasingly more complex topologies. Some of the Asian and European telecom guys came over expressly to help them design a network that was both interesting and realistic. There's more geeky stuff I could say about it, but that's mostly for my trip report to my cow-orkers (excuse me, 'colleagues').
The point is that it was a collaborative, supportive environment, where we were just trying to see if we could all interoperate. To flush out the hidden assumptions and different interpretations of the standards. To trigger those conditions that just didn't happen back in the QA lab. Call me naive,but I'd never been to a big test event like this before.
From a personal standpoint, it reminded me that we actually do produce a product that does operate in real-world networks, which sometimes do some interesting and unusual things. Now I'm thinking about what we should bring to, and what we should test at phase 2 of the test, which will be in February. I'm motivated again, how about that.
Oh, and I have to hand it to the local catering company. In two weeks, we didn't have the same breakfast or lunch twice, and it was all uniformly good (not outstanding, but good).
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-19 11:19 am (UTC)