06-18, 10:00–11:00 (US/Eastern), Room A
While many companies have a network engineer that becomes the de facto packet analyst, building a full performance engineering (PE) team takes time and effort, as well as support from upper management. This talk will chronicle one team's experience with building and maintaining a high-achieving PE team over the past 13 years.
I am an Ohioan by birth and current residence, but wandered a bit before returning to the state. I grew up on a farm and had a penchant for all things mechanical, so got a degree in mechanical engineering and worked on fighter jet propulsion systems as my first job before deciding I wanted to try something different.
That something different took me to Africa, as I joined the U.S. Peace Corps to teach high-school calc and trig in Mali, then stayed there for a total of 4.5 years as a computer consultant and teacher.
After returning from Mali, I obtained a master's in Information Networking and have been in IT for nearly 30 years, most of it as a network performance analyst using packet traces and statistical modeling to analyze and predict performance of distributed systems.
I am married with two (mostly) grown kids and a clowder of cats, although the older cats make it more of a glaring at times when the young ones become too rambunctious.