Crafting your resume

I've been reading and qualifying resumes for an application engineer in my group. I received hundreds of resumes. I have read every single one of them. Being on the reading side of resumes does provide some interesting perspective. Here are a couple of tips. They are really basic, but nevertheless worth repeating.

• A objective spells it out very clearly why you are applying for the job. Tailor it to the specific job. It is the first thing the hiring manager will read on your resume. Often one of the first questions on a phone interview is "what are you looking for in this job?". The objective should answer that question. Do customize it for the job you are applying for.
• List when you are a US Citizen or US Person. Especially when the job requirement states that US citizens are desired (e.g. in the defense or intelligence industry).
• Send your resume in PDF to avoid the layout being screwed up when the hiring manager opens up a Microsoft Word resume.
• Don't call it resume.pdf. I often saved the resumes in a folder to check later in the day. When you call your firstnameLastnameResume.pdf, I did not have to rename the file plus your name sticks out in the file. Keep your brand up.
• Spellcheck. Seriously! This sounds obvious but I encountered lots of spelling errors on resumes.
• Spend a little time on the layout and readability of your resume. When the hiring manager is reading hundreds of resumes, avoid that he or she needs to take a second pass to understand your profile and capabilities.
• Stick with traditional resume formats, unless you are applying for an artist or graphic designer. 2 pages.
• When a new grad, listing your courses and specific project work is a plus and a great hook during the phone interview. "In my fly-robot project, I was able to demonstrate ..."
• When you apply for a computer engineering job, do not list Microsoft Outlook. If you have to highlight that you know how to send and read an email, you are in trouble. Similarly, it is assumed you know how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. If you created a novel macro for Microsoft Excel, do list it. But detail that is was more than just using Outlook. That's useful.
• If the submission process allows you to add a cover when submitting your resume, do so. A cover letter allows you to sell yourself. You can use full sentences, rather than the short form often used on a resume.
• If you do get a phone interview, do follow up with an email afterwards. Ask for the email address. This is a nice touch and shows you really are interested in the job.

Alternative Workplace Settings

The first four years of my professional life I spent in a cubicle: four gray walls, while overhearing colleague's love life or even job search phone conversations. At Sun, I moved into a private office and on occasion the corner flexible office, overlooking the the courtyard and palm trees. Since RTI was subleasing from Sun, it felt as if I never had left Sun: the office furniture, the sliding door, even the conference room name tags were identical.

Several months ago, when we received the news that our company had signed a new lease for our new headquarters, I prepared a small presentation about different workplace settings. It turned out the new building was an empty shell which we needed to furnish.

Thanks to the new embeddable presentations feature of Google Docs, here is an abbreviated presentation.

Moving Day

On June 13, 2006, I moved into my office at Freedom Circle in Santa Clara. From the 6th floor, I had a great view of the Bay Area (see: new window of opportunity). In spring, my office became my green house. I have grown seedlings of tomatoes, basil, chard, sage, poppies and zinnia, which I later on transplanted to our garden.

As I left my office tonight, everything was boxed up. All my books, notebooks and clutter fitted nicely in four moving boxes. A monitor, computer peripherals, a fan, two chairs, a mobile file cabinet, and the trash can are all labeled. Tomorrow is moving day.

Disco in my pants

Halloween, celebrated on the night of October 31th, is always a big deal in the United States. I hear it has become a big deal even in Belgium.

The term Halloween (and its older rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening of/before "All Hallows' Day", also known as "All Saints' Day". ... On Halloween night adults and children dress up as creatures from the underworld (e.g., ghosts, ghouls, zombies, witches and goblins), light bonfires, and enjoy spectacular fireworks displays (despite the fact that such displays are usually illegal). Halloween was perceived as the night during which the division between the world of the living and the otherworld was blurred so spirits of the dead and inhabitants from the underworld were able to walk free on the earth. It was necessary to dress as a spirit or otherworldly creature when venturing outdoors to blend in. The children knock on the neighbors' doors, in order to gather fruit, nuts, and sweets for the Halloween festival. Salt was once sprinkled in the hair of the children to protect against evil spirits. (Wikipedia)

Last year, I missed the company Halloween party as I was on a business trip. However, I helped build on our Disco Scarecrow. Disco shoes $5; a John Travolta suit ($19), a disco ball for his head ($19); a wig, some materials from Osh, a stroboscope in his pants ($25). Kicking marketing and core engineering's butt while having fun with your services teammates ... priceless.

Three B-S of design reviews

I am in San Diego this week to be at the critical design review (CDR) of my main project. In a CDR, we present the software architecture, go over design decisions made, discus risk items and schedule. A CDR takes about 4 hours (when lucky), but they can get very long depending on the questions and side discussions. To keep CDRs within schedule, I picked up a great tip: the 3 B-S of design reviews

1. Be Sincere - when you do not know the answer to a question, say so. Don't try to wing it or dance around it.
   
2. Be Succinct - be short and clear in your answers.
3. Be Seated - answer the question and close it. Don't linger, or leave answers half open. It is just an invitation for others to put in their 2 cents, a comment or open a can of worms.

"Daar is 'm ... daar is 'm"

The most mythical goal of Belgians Red Devils: Belgium - The Nederlands, 1985, world cup qualifier to go to Mexico.

Sport-Voetbal Magazine heeft het doelpunt waarmee Georges Grün België in 1985 ten koste van het Nederlands elftal naar Mexico kopte uitgeroepen tot meest mythische doelpunt ooit van de Rode Duivels. Ook Rik De Sadeleer op zijn best.

• "Ze gaan lopen ... ze gaan lopen"
• "Daar is 'm ... daar is 'm"
• "'t Is om er geel van te worden"
• "Dank U George"
  

(Telegraaf)

Pizookies

Our tools group hit a major milestone this week. Take a look at the suite of developer tools for applications using the Data Distribution Service on our website. To celebrate, we met in our breakroom for BJ Pizookies (also known as pazookie). Huh? My first reaction was this was some sort of game. Nope.

1. BJ = BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse in Cupertino. (Silicon Valley oldtimers know it as the old Peppermill in front of the Apple Headquarters on De Anza Boulevard)
   
2. Pizookies are giant, barely cooked cookies, baked in a pizza dish and served in a pizza box. Pizza+cookie=pizookie, get it? You can choose from: peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip, and white chocolate macadamia nut. They are best served with a scoop of ice cream and taste pretty great.
   

So there you go, a new word in my slang dictionary: pizookies.

New window of opportunity

Since a few weeks, I moved to a new office: one with a new window of opportunity. A pretty nice place, on the west side of the building. In front of my office are a few couches to hang out. Here are a few pictures:


Right in front of my office, at about 300-400 meter is another big office tower (McAfee). To the left, is a distant view of the San Jose skyline. The San Jose international airport is in between, so I see airplanes take off and land throughout the day.

On the right side (behind my monitor) is a view of Highway 101 and the Great America Parkway/Bowers off ramp. I typically close my blinds a bit. First of all, to dim the sunlight behind my monitor. Secondly, the traffic can be distracting. At the other hand, watching the slow traffic during the afternoon commute is entertaining. In the distant are the mountains of Cupertino.


The view during the night is impressive. I wonder how the view must be at level 9, where a new startup, Code Green Networks, recently moved in.

Day 1

06:00AM - Korea vs Togo (2 - 1)
08:00AM - Say bye to my wife and kids + Coffee
09:30AM - Stroll over to RTI on the 6th floor of the Mission Towers at Freedom Circle

10:00AM - First day at RTI

My new little office, all ready to go.

Flex

Since recent, I have given my 'official' office (see How I work), and have gone Flex. This means that I have no regular office, but can reserve an office anywhere. I work two days in Menlo Park (Tuesday is our staff meeting), and three days in Santa Clara. Each office is fully equiped: phone, SunRay, paper, pens. The things you give up is a place for your books and your pictures. My files and books are in a locker in Menlo Park. But that isn't a big deal, since I hardly used them. Googling for information is much faster than trying to find something in a book. Here are a couple of more pictures from the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara campus.

My old office - for nearly 8 years, this obscure building (MPK24), about 3/4 mile from the main Sun Menlo Park Campus has housed my windowless office. Sure this warehouse style building provided big lab space, but it was remote from the action at the main campus.

Here are a couple of picture from my current flex office at the Santa Clara campus.
A view from my current flex office:

The restored historic clock tower building (originally part of the Agnews Insane Asylum - how ironic) . The office shot (above) was taken from the left windown at the second floor.

Technorati:Sun Microsystems

How I work

Fortune magazine has great series, called How I work, on how several succesful business people work: the tools, the schedules, the habits. Interesting how Hank Paulson, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, has never even used email. Or how Bill Gates uses Outlook across two monitors (and still believes Outlook is great - what's up with that?). Google-geek Marissa Mayer, like some of my colleagues, wouldn't trade Pine (text based, courier font) for any other email tool. I bet ya, she authors her documents in vi.

My work environment
My preferred system is my personal Apple Powerbook laptop. However, since my work (files) live on 'the network', I use a variety of systems to do my work. All I need is power and a network. Both my work email and calendar are on Edge servers. This means they can be accessed over a secure (SSL) link, from anywhere and any machine. Normally one is required to log in (over VPN) into the private corporate network. With our Edge mail and calendar servers, I no longer need to log in. This allows for a great level of flexibility. My office is in Menlo Park. My office desktop is a Sun Ultra 20 Opteron based desktop running Solaris 10. At least 3 days a week, I work from other locations within the company using a SunRay. SunRay's a nitfy thin client. Using a JavaBadge, my work environment (my files, my graphical user interface, my open documents, etc.) follow me around throughout the Bay Area: all I have to do is pop in my JavaBadge into a SunRay, and voila, there is my screen. At home, I use my Apple Powerbook, or a company Toshiba M2 laptop, running Fedora 3.

The Tools
I read email using Mail.app (MacOS X) or Thunderbird (Solaris 10, Linux). Both are configured with many filters, which put my emails in the right buckets, priorities and label them accordingly. On average I get about 150 emails per day.

My personal email is shielded into a Gmail account. I access my gmail via both the brower interface (because it has chat easily integrated), as well as POP to Mail.app.

I use both Safari and Firefox, and opt for ad-blocking proxies.

I keep up to date on technology news, news in the world, friend's blogs via RSS. I use Ranchero's NetNewsWire (MacOS X), Sage and Google Reader as my RSS readers. Recently, I started to use Google Reader a lot more, due to the fact that labeled feeds can be spliced and automatically included in my blog (the right side bar - Interesting bits I read).

Chat: AIM/iChat (waffletchnlgy), Google Talk
SMS: my calendar at work reminds me via SMS about upcoming appointments. I used to synchronize my cell phone with iCal (MacOS X), but due to an incompatibility, it was inefficient to synchronize both personal, work and mobile calendars.

I live on the network, love small and efficient tools. I use quiet a lot of Twiki throughout the day for status updates, product tracking, documentation etc. Oh, and I do carry around a notebook. All work gets divided weekly among five categories: Urgent, Important, Other, Personal and One-on-One. It helps prioritizing all the things to be done.

Where I work?
My 'official' office is in Menlo Park. I work in the Sunnyvale campus (once a week), the Santa Clara campus (two or three times a week) and from home. I get around via both my car, the company shuttle, sometimes the train, and in summer on the bicycle. Here are a few pictures from the Santa Clara campus I work out of regularly.

Technorati:Fortune work tools Bill Gates Marissa Mayer

Playboy helps delivering open source and other packages for (Open)Solaris

You got to love this: open source and other packages compiled for Solaris are delivered by ... Playboy.com. Just check out the sponsors, hardware and bandwidth providers behind blastwave.org: http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0042/index.html

OpenSolaris marketing, start your engines: we probably can get a lot of TheRegister or SlashDot hits around that.

"No, I was not surfing for porn. I was trying to download PostgressDB from playboy.com."

Campeon del Mundo!

The morning of September 25, I woke up to my dad chanting: Tom Boonen is the new world champion cycling! The Belgian national team had apparently been riding a fantastic race in Madrid. Every time somebody attacked, one or two of the Belgian riders participated. I watched it delayed on cycling.tv. The end was extremely exciting. While Bettini was omni present, for a moment, I thought it was going to be a Dutch rider. In the final kilometers, a group of six were ahead, among them two Dutch riders. Luckily, they were caught and in the sprint, Tom Boonen showed who was King.

Belgium has a rich cycling tradition. Growing up, I watched religiously all the Classic races, as well as the Tour de France, typically from 2PM till finish (around 5PM). I compare the experience to watching the baseball play-offs. Sure, it takes several hours. But a lot of things can happen and at any given time. It was rarely boring. (Unlike basketball, where there is a lot of scoring, but you really only have to watch the last 3 minutes to get the excitment.) Watching cycling on TV was typically very exciting.

In Belgium, I grew up on a bicycle. I went to primary school by bicycle. Twenty two kilometers a day to and from high school. Twenty two kilometers to and from university. Hundreds of kilometers a day on vacation throughout Europe. Even in California, I bought a racing bicycle and even conquered Mount Hamilton a couple of times. But then it slowed down a little.

Recently, I found the motivation again to hop on my bike:

• KRIB (Katrina, Rita, Iraq and Bush) have sent gas prices through the roof.

• A Honda Civic fits four. Five at most. With my parents in town, we are one too many to fit in one car. I've choosen to pedal behind the calvery and show up at parties half an hour later in bicycle gear.
  
• Riding a bicycle over the Menlo Park bicycle bridge looking down at bumper to bumper traffic gives a kick.
  
• It eases our commute to work and school.
• And I get to exercise a little. Luckily there are showers at work, so, I can refresh before sitting behind my computer.

So, three to four times a week, I have been commuting to work by bicycle or combining two bicycle trips with a ride on caltain. See hi when you see a guy with a jersey of Vlaanderen 2002, a big backpack and riding a black Trek 1200 commuter racing bike.

Technorati: Cycling Tom Boonen

Goodness, Gracious - Great Halls of Fame!

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this got to be unbelievable. What a player!"

"That's right, John! And did you know he is only the fourth player in history to be able to score two touchdowns in a double digits fourth quarter comeback. What a game!"

"He sure earned his credits to go to Canton, Ohio."

I heard NFL players get to go to on a field trip to Disneyland when they win the superbowl. But where is Canton, Ohio? Or did he say Dayton, Ohio? It turns out Canton is the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a museum of football players and events.


Similarly as there is a Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, a Tennis Hall of Fame and even a Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame. Sounds all pretty interesting to take a peek. Especially since I haven't heard of them in Europe. A Soccer Hall of Fame? A Biljart Hall of Fame? A Cycling Hall of Fame? The closest thing to a soccer hall of fame would be the thropies and scarfs hanging in the club bar. Or the website celebrating 125 years of Royal Antwerp Football club and a celebration game between the players who used to play for the team througout the years and a top international team, such as Manchester United. But after the game, it is back to the daily obscurity for most of those players.

When I heard about a process to be inducted in the hall of fame, as well as limitation on the number of inductees, I was disappointed. Can you imagine the lobbying effort to get your player or band inducted? Let's take a look at the 2005 inductees into the rock 'n roll hall of fame: U2! Hold on a second. U2 isn't already part of the elite gang? And the famous "rock 'n roll" duo, Simon and Garfunkel (!), were inducted in 1990. Or for that manner, "rock 'n roller" Bob Marley in 1994.

Or take a look at the tennis group: Ivan Lendl ("Leno") finally made it in 2001! That's 12 years after ending his career of 94 Singles Titles and 52 Finals and 6 Doubles Titles and 10 Finals.

And that's when I realized this has nothing to do with the merits of the player, the band or the sport. It is about hijacking a sport to create a profit center. And a ceremony show. And let's sell commercial time slots. Anyone interesting in starting a hall of fame restaurant chain where we sell jackets and pins? No thank you! I prefer the smoke filled club bar with the trophy box.

Technorati: NFL Tennis Music

Waiting for Gridot

Over the last months, I have morphed from thinking about applications in terms of processes and threads to an even more parallized form of computing. That is, I use the word grid about a hundred times a day: utility computing grid, grid computing, distributed resource managers (DRM), shared virtual memory systems, job management and placements software and so on.


Sun Grid Rack with Sun Fire v20z compute nodes

Initially I spend a lot of time trying to understand the many aspects of grid computing. Next I distilled it into two definitions which intended to make it easier for partners to understand what we ment with grid. In a narrow definition, it came down to sharing (heterogenous) compute resources. However, grid was also being used in a much broader context of the entire infrastructure running, managing, provisioning, loadbalancing the heterogenous resources upon which more loosely coupled and parallelized applications were scheduled. (The fun is only starting.)

Many presentations derailed on the slide trying to define grid. Everybody seemed to have their spin on grid and wanted to have the nuance of their definition heard. Only few realized that most of us were all in agreement and were talking about the same thing: the sharing of distributed resources. As a donkey doesn't hit his feet twice on the same rock, I avoid grid definition discussions and omit the slide from my presentations.

A colleague, who spent the last decade trolling around in the world of grid, said it best:

There is a play by the Nobel laureate Irish absurd playwriter Samuel Beckett, called "Waiting for Godot." Two homeless people have a dialogue in a park, while waiting for someone called Godot. The play ends and Godot never arrives.
Paraphrasing Beckett, [one could use the] "Waiting for Grid-ot" metaphor. If we believe Gridot will arrive some day, we will make many computers work better and better together.
Gridot will arrive when the entire planet will be managed as one computer. We replace the Grid definition with our new faith in Gridot! :-)

Oh, and what might this have to do with flanders you might ask? Recently the university of Antwerp created Belgium's fastest computer: the CalcUA - a grid cluster of Sun Fire V20z - at the University of Antwerp: http://www.calcua.ua.ac.be/

Technorati: grid

Should I start bossing around?

Success in Belgium often is measured by how many people you can boss around. This may be a metric if you studied business school, but I have found it strange when you are an engineer. The engineering school barely could sneek in a class of macro economics. And boy-o-boy was that a succesful and well attended class. Forget about any business or management classes. So, to measure the success of an engineer based upon how many people work for you doesn't make much sense to me. As Rummy would state: that's the old world [1] (hierarchical system).

At the age of 30, I value an interesting job that allows for lots of new experiences and technologies much higher than jumping on the management train. At least for now. Sure, I'll take the lead of a project any time (aka project manager). But I am not ready yet for becoming a 'people manager'. And that's just the way Sun works. You are either a people manager or an individual contributor.

Last week, I got a new manager - a current colleague who chooses to become people manager. My current manager got promoted to director and got a bunch more people reporting to him. For the first time in my almost six years at Sun Microsystems, my manager will be local near the Menlo Park campus (aka "Sun Quentin", named after its resemblance to the big buildings of San Francisco high security state prison San Quentin).

My former managers were all located in Burlington, Massachusetts. This setup required some adjustments. Formost, you have to be able to work very independently. Not only were they located across country, I barely got to see them or talk to them: no casual chit-chat in the hallway or near the water cooler. One had to be proactive and schedule (briefing) time, but it always felt more official than a chat in the hallway. In addition, my managers have been quiet hands-off. Besides setting the overall goals, it was up to us to fill in the blanks and to define the individual projects. It was as if I had my one person shop set up within Sun. So I adapted. And once you got the hang of it, it is actually quiet a nice setup. This might change now. My new manager is only two offices away. Staff meetings will be in person and no longer on the phone. Bye bye emailing and checking out the stock market while the meeting dragged on. Hopefully, this won't change to much my style of working. While change is inevitable, being able to work in a flexible work environment has always been one of the major attractions to work at Sun. I believe it has played a big role in the overall success of Sun. On that note: as we launched the new kick-ass Solaris 10 operating environment yesterday at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, SUNW broke the $5 barrier.