Fraser Speirs (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fraserspeirs) wrote,@ 2006-07-31 21:23:00 |
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Moving On
Today is the day I've been working towards for about a year now - my last day at Glasgow University. You could say that I've been working towards leaving the University for a decade, having been here in various guises since 1996, but it was a year ago that I decided it was time to move on.
For a while, it was unimaginably far away - 300 days. Then it was 200 days, which is just two of the famous "100 days" periods in which leaders are judged. Then 100 days, then 60, then 31 and now 1. As of tomorrow, I'm a part-time teacher and part-time software developer. To think that, a year on from starting Connected Flow, I'm now making part of my income writing Mac software is pretty awesome for me.
I feel weird and nervous, hopeful that this next phase will be successful. I've learned a lot in the last 10 years. When I started here I was a dilettante, a barely competent Hypercard hacker. On leaving, I now write commercial Mac software used every day by thousands of people, I've written for O'Reilly, I've run a BoF at WWDC, I'm friends with people in whose orbit I never expected to circle. I've been fortunate to get to know the right people at the right times, and sometimes build the right application at the right time, but it would be false modesty to say that all this isn't, at least in part, the product of ten years of hard work, late nights and serious application.
Still, I felt sad leaving the University today for the last time. I guess you don't just walk away from a ten-year relationship with a person or an institution without some thoughts of what was and what perhaps could or should have been. I felt sadder for all the avenues that are now closed off, rather than for anything that actually happened. I remember well reading through the course prospectus in the summer of 1996 and realising that I could choose literally any course I wanted. I was qualified for, although certainly not temperamentally suited for, almost any course the University offered. That feeling of breadth of opportunity is something I've never felt since, and likely never will again.
My team took me out for a nice lunch today and said some very nice things about me. The comment that struck home was when it was pointed out that when I joined the effort there were no grid services anywhere in Scotland. Not a single machine from ScotGrid was available to anyone. I leave with multiple hundreds of CPUs and tens of Terabytes of storage performing around the clock as reliably as software will allow. There are some situations in which you will never change the world, or even the course of your project, in any significant way. The important metric in such situations, and the one that means most to me is this: did I leave things better than I found them? I feel happy that I can point to quantitative and qualitative evidence that I certainly did. It would be nice for my own vanity to find some "the first" thing that I did. I think it's more or less correct to say that I installed and ran the first production-grade grid computing system in Scotland.
I was given a few unexpected but very nice gifts at my leaving lunch: On Photography by Susan Sontag, the big paperback edition of The Photo Book, a Dilbert book and a rather special certificate:
I think this certificate requires an adjunct to my law of employer evaluation:
Seriously, however, I have learned a ton of things in this job about how to manage time, people and resources. About how to evaluate the cost of projects (hint: count staff cost, not just hardware and software!) and how much one can realistically achieve on one-sixth of one person's time (answer: basically nothing except picking up the phone to call out your turnkey vendor).
So, to newer things I go. Thanks, GU. It got a bit weird towards the end, but it was a good trip.
Today is the day I've been working towards for about a year now - my last day at Glasgow University. You could say that I've been working towards leaving the University for a decade, having been here in various guises since 1996, but it was a year ago that I decided it was time to move on.
For a while, it was unimaginably far away - 300 days. Then it was 200 days, which is just two of the famous "100 days" periods in which leaders are judged. Then 100 days, then 60, then 31 and now 1. As of tomorrow, I'm a part-time teacher and part-time software developer. To think that, a year on from starting Connected Flow, I'm now making part of my income writing Mac software is pretty awesome for me.
I feel weird and nervous, hopeful that this next phase will be successful. I've learned a lot in the last 10 years. When I started here I was a dilettante, a barely competent Hypercard hacker. On leaving, I now write commercial Mac software used every day by thousands of people, I've written for O'Reilly, I've run a BoF at WWDC, I'm friends with people in whose orbit I never expected to circle. I've been fortunate to get to know the right people at the right times, and sometimes build the right application at the right time, but it would be false modesty to say that all this isn't, at least in part, the product of ten years of hard work, late nights and serious application.
Still, I felt sad leaving the University today for the last time. I guess you don't just walk away from a ten-year relationship with a person or an institution without some thoughts of what was and what perhaps could or should have been. I felt sadder for all the avenues that are now closed off, rather than for anything that actually happened. I remember well reading through the course prospectus in the summer of 1996 and realising that I could choose literally any course I wanted. I was qualified for, although certainly not temperamentally suited for, almost any course the University offered. That feeling of breadth of opportunity is something I've never felt since, and likely never will again.
My team took me out for a nice lunch today and said some very nice things about me. The comment that struck home was when it was pointed out that when I joined the effort there were no grid services anywhere in Scotland. Not a single machine from ScotGrid was available to anyone. I leave with multiple hundreds of CPUs and tens of Terabytes of storage performing around the clock as reliably as software will allow. There are some situations in which you will never change the world, or even the course of your project, in any significant way. The important metric in such situations, and the one that means most to me is this: did I leave things better than I found them? I feel happy that I can point to quantitative and qualitative evidence that I certainly did. It would be nice for my own vanity to find some "the first" thing that I did. I think it's more or less correct to say that I installed and ran the first production-grade grid computing system in Scotland.
I was given a few unexpected but very nice gifts at my leaving lunch: On Photography by Susan Sontag, the big paperback edition of The Photo Book, a Dilbert book and a rather special certificate:
I think this certificate requires an adjunct to my law of employer evaluation:
If your project had a predecessor project, and people wear T-Shirts saying "I survived Project XYZ", naming the predecessor, run a mile. Moreover, if only one or two people have such shirts, it means everyone else from Project XYZ bailed out before your project started.
Seriously, however, I have learned a ton of things in this job about how to manage time, people and resources. About how to evaluate the cost of projects (hint: count staff cost, not just hardware and software!) and how much one can realistically achieve on one-sixth of one person's time (answer: basically nothing except picking up the phone to call out your turnkey vendor).
So, to newer things I go. Thanks, GU. It got a bit weird towards the end, but it was a good trip.
