What does Tom know?

My experience is primarily as a QA engineer.  This is my bread and butter and has been since my intern days (2002 - 2003) at Sun Microsystems.  Very rarely do you find a company/institution as great as Sun.  Every day was a joy.  Working with some of the greatest minds in the IT industry on a daily basis and getting paid for it was awesome.  The good old days.

I had a brief spell (2 years) in the financial industry.  Not my cup of tea, end of story.

Back to Sun in 2006 and working on virtualization tools, testing and automation.  I have one simple goal in work.  I want to execute, analyse and communicate everything with the click of one button in less than the time it takes to make a coffee.

To clarify, I like speed.  If a testsuite takes 1 hour to run then I want to run it in 10 minutes or 1 minute.  If a test machine takes 1 hour to setup I want it ready in 2 minutes.  Back in 2006 whilst in the Java QA team at Sun I worked on my own project to create an "Instant Virtual Lab".  Using Microsoft VirtualPC and cloned golden images I could generate and create multiple test machines with a clean state and testsuites included in a few minutes.  Fast forward to 2008 and I moved onto Virtualbox and VMware ESXI.  Combining Virtualbox and ZFS provided great benefits such as snapshotting and cloning (See ZFS and Virtualbox blog).

I love simplicity.  Why is Facebook such a phenomenon?  Its social simplicity at its finest.  If every tool in the IT industry was designed with this type of simplicity then the hours, days and years wasted in every company using sub standard tools would be saved.

Im currently working on testing Solaris on Oracle's latests hardware platforms.  I cant say too much but the future looks very bright for Oracle.  Combining Oracle's money making skills and Sun's IP is a force to be reckoned with.

I also enjoy idea generation and have submitted a number of invention disclosures this year through Oracle.  Unfortunately the Patent process is long and drawn out so it may be a while before reaping the rewards.

As well as my 9 to 5 job at Oracle I also do some teaching, computer repair etc through my website : TomWillFixIT.com.

Where do I see myself in 5 years time?  I'd love to work in a research and development role for an innovative IT company.  Fixing problems and working outside of the box, taking technology in different directions that benefit humanity.  Working with state of the art technology, great minds and having the freedom to develop ideas is the dream.

If you have any questions about the following then leave a comment and I'll reply asap : virtualbox, ovm, zfs, sparc, scripting, zenity, bart, webmin, jquery

Thanks for reading,
Tom