Ch-ch-changes.

As some of you know, I'm no longer at VMware. It feels a bit like leaving home. VMware took a chance on me as a new college grad way back in 2000, and taught me a lot along the way. I will miss my colleagues, many of whom are excellent, and will always be proud of what we accomplished together. I expect VMware will continue to be successful both technically and as a business, and they treated me very well. I did not leave due to a long list of complaints; it simply had been nine years, and I had decided it was time to try something different.

I've been waiting to update this blog until I had a clear idea of what that "something different" was. My long fast in the woods is over: I'm working in the search team at facebook, trying to make a whole lot of data available to a whole lot of users. You might think that the title of this blog is less relevant than it once was; search sounds, initially, like an application, pretty high up the abstraction stack from the hardware. This is true, but search is also a special application, enormously demanding in computational resources. We're pushing the hardware close to its limits in several dimensions simultaneously, and some knotty systems issues arise. I'm not ready to talk about them in any depth yet, not out of secrecy, but ignorance. I'm still learning the ropes here, and any attempt to drop science at this point would just be silly.