Hello Mark! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
When I was a kid, I fried the graphics card in my first computer, an Apple IIe. My dad was furious but also impressed as I explained that I was adding a jumper to the graphics card to double the resolution of the output. We repaired the machine together after ordering a replacement part and installed it myself. Although I never considered myself a computer nerd in school, it was something that I had a knack for: tinkering, tweaking, and breaking. Eventually, that proclivity would become an actual programming skill in C, C#, Shell, Pascal, and other tool-specific languages. But really, I just wanted to be a bad-ass blues guitarist and tour the world playing music and not having to use my brain to do math stuff.
What is your professional background?
After 4-years in college, I had no idea what to do, so I took temporary positions doing office work. One of them was as an email system administrator, where I would go into the data center 1-2 times a day and restart the SMTP services on a Xerox machine. There were huge mainframes and tape machines and all these things I had only ever seen movies. But it was cold and noisy, but also exciting. I found a book in my desk by computer scientist Boris Beizer describing a technique to measure the performance of a microprocessor by tuning a radio to a matching sympathetic frequency so you could HEAR the sound of the instructions being processed. I was enthralled with idea of processing performance from that day forward, and here now, 33 years later, I'm still fascinated by computer performance.
How does Dynatrace fit into the picture, and what was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you overcome?
In my career's work as a tester, I have found myself tirelessly trying to explain what I thought was going wrong inside a computer system and learn how to communicate that hypothesis to other engineers who knew more than I did. Without much surprise, I find most software engineers don't have time to sit and count the CPU ticks on the AM radio sitting in the data center. I was always looking for easier, faster, and more comprehensive ways to prove my ideas (rightly or wrongly) and share the outcomes of the experiments with my colleagues. And to do this without pausing the program in a breakpoint would be essential to reproducing the anomalies I was testing. Dynatrace quickly became my preferred "x-ray glasses" for showing what the code and the hardware systems were actually doing. The visual correlations and deep tracing capabilities were powerful enough to support even the most rigorous objections from the best software engineers I knew.
What makes Dynatrace Community important to you?
Dynatracing work is hard work. It's complex and it's constantly changing. I have often been the only engineer working on performance tests, weird anomalies, and problems with hard-to-reproduce bugs. The Dynatrace Community is a place where I constantly find like-minded engineers who are equally supportive of each other and the sometimes lonely and isolated contexts of our work in performance. It's especially cool to meet up locally or at PERFORM each year to meet people from the Community and get to know them better.
Also, the Dynatrace Community is packed with knowledge, which is something I think is critical to the growth and success of any IT practitioner. It is especially rare to find a member-focused community with robust submissions on various topics, questions, and ideas. In my experience, most big software vendors over-curate their forums and have robotic nonsense replies written by quota-driven 3rd parties. That just ruins the content, pollutes the community, and disengages people.
"The Dynatrace Community is packed with knowledge, which is something I think is critical to the growth and success of any IT practitioner. It is especially rare to find a member-focused community with robust submissions on various topics, questions, and ideas."
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
I am a musician and lover of music. I play electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, dobro slide guitar, lap steel guitar, mandolin, and I'm learning the piano. But I was so lucky to find in my early years learning and playing music that I am absolutely allergic to the sound of the banjo. To this day I believe the banjo to be an abhorrent mistreatment of everything that is good about music. As a privileged technology worker, I'm lucky enough to have built a home recording studio and I currently collaborate on several projects with my non-banjo playing musician friends. None of the recordings feature the banjo or anything that even remotely sounds like a banjo.
🔹I have 6 tattoos on my arms, each of which was inked on some previous year's birthday.
🔹I have never jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, at any altitude.
🔹I have a music recording studio in my house and host jams and recording sessions.
What achievement are you most proud of?
There's no single achievement for me because I see work differently. If anything, I'm proud of my continued privilege to do this very unique work we do in technology and I'm grateful to have such longevity in my career. I'm proud of the contributions to and support of our global community of performance engineering practitioners who are working at all stages in their own journey.
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