Hi! My name is David vonThenen. I am a Developer Advocate with EMC {code}. Yes, that EMC that makes all the storage products we have all come to know and love. I have recently been given the opportunity to join a fairly new group, the {code} team, within EMC that lives and breathes Open Source by making contributions back to the community. Part of this new journey includes a lot of outward facing collaboration with users of projects that EMC has open sourced but also a lot of collaboration with other developer and community projects out there. That leads me to my first blog post!
Who am I? I have been working in the technology industry for many years now in varying disciplines including: semiconductors, mainframes, storage area networks (FC, iSCSI, FCoE), distributed systems, backup/recovery solutions, virtualization (VMware), cloud, and etc. All these roles have been in your traditional enterprise corporate environment where you get some requirements from some product marketing monkey to tell you how they interpreted what the customer wants. Ever play a game of telephone? Now try it with a non-technical person armed with only acronyms. Yea, usually doesn’t go well but I digress.
When I heard about EMC {code}, I jump at the opportunity to take how I developed software and completely turn that world upside-down. Gone are the days of those marketing monkeys, gone are those silly 6 to 12 month development cycles, and gone are the closed proprietary software solutions. One of the biggest draws for me going Open Source was the collaboration with developers and users and the other social aspects of this change, like the idea of speaking at meetups. A lot of software engineer would say “whaaaa?” Yup, even the simple side of social media like tweeting what I have been working on without having the fear of exposing some critical feature before the release or tipping our hand to competitors.
Another thing I am looking forward is working with all the new technology out there. Docker, Mesos, and etc. I have been predominately known as a C++ and Java Spring developer, but I am very interested in learning some of the new modern languages out there. I just recently picked up Golang by going through some online tutorials, reading a couple of books (yea, I still do that), and recreating several projects that I quite frequently need to do in C++ or Spring land by making the Golang equivalent. Looking forward to my first real project using it.
What about outside work?
Well enough of that boring crap. I got started with programming around the time I was in high school, but was self-taught programmer primarily in C++ making my own video games. One of my favorite subjects in high school was chemistry so I did start off as a chemistry major in college (hence, the Breaking Bad motif of my blog), but about 2 years in, I realized that I couldn’t leave programming, computers and technology behind. So I ended up double majoring in Computer Science as well. I love poker (particularly no limit Texas Hold’em), I actually enjoy going to the gym and have a home gym for when I can’t make it, I am the proud owner of 2 boxer dogs (Sydney and Izzy), huge fan of aged Irish Whiskey (love Glenfiddich 18 or Jameson for your casual kind of drinking), I am a foodie who will try anything once, and I am one of those car guys who drives a muscle car.
Now what?
Well I hope that you stick around and visit my blog every once in a while as I plan to blog on various topics relating to technology, some of the things that I am working or even things that interest me. If you happen to live in the Orange or Los Angeles County area, I have been active in the MeetUp community. You can also find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub.